October 31, 2011 • 34 mins
In part one of a special author interview, Dr. Holly Tucker talks about her new book, "Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution." Tune in to learn more about the startling history of blood transfusion.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm to Blaine and Chuck reporting,
and we have a another very special October Halloween Spooky
(00:21):
episode for you today. This time it is an interview.
In fact, yes, we did something really cool recently. Last month,
we went to the Decatur Book Festival right here in Georgia,
and we got the chance to see Holly Tucker, who
was an associate professor at Vanderbilt University, talk about her
new book, which is called blood Work, A Tale of
(00:42):
Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution. So we went
into it excited about it, but thinking, Okay, this is
going to be a book all about the history of
blood and blood circulation and blood transfusions. But what we
found was so so much more. Well. Yeah, and because
Holly's interview was as part of the Atlanta Science Taverns
First Science Track at the Decatur Book Festival, I had
(01:05):
a suspicion that there would be more than just just
sort of a straight medical story. And I mean there
is a lot more their monsters. There's murder obviously in
the title, and Um, the thing that surprised me most
about the book and about Holly's lecture though, is that
the history of blood transfusion starts so much earlier than
(01:26):
you would expect. I guess that's the first Uh, maybe
a little disturbing fact about the book. I mean it
starts off in the six hundreds. Yeah, just to give
you a brief rundown, it's about the very first blood
human blood transfusion, which took place in the sixteen hundreds,
and the man who performed them and how his experiments
were kind of shut down, and the mystery, the murder
(01:50):
mystery surrounding well. In this rivalry too, there are a
lot of rivalries that play between France where the first
transfusion took place, in England where the early your experiments
in blood transfusions with animals took place, and um, just
rivalry among the doctors in France too. So there's a
lot going on. And then there are some really pretty
(02:11):
horrific experiments. So I think you guys are gonna like
this and like hearing about sort of a Dr Frankenstein
sort of sort of medical history. Yeah, it's definitely a
monster story. And Holly Tucker took us through this for
about forty five minutes, and we were riveted in our chairs,
and not just by the story, but by her too.
(02:32):
She's such a cool person with a enviewable career that
we will discuss more later, but first we want to
start with the story. Yeah, and the first question we
wanted to ask her was how did she find something
like this, because, as we just mentioned, we were surprised
that the history of blood transfusion started in the seventeenth century.
How did Holly stumble upon this? Here's what she had
(02:56):
to say. Well, the best thing about being a university
professor is that you teach, and when it works really well. Um,
and especially a place like Manderbelt often does, is that
what you do in the classroom informs your research, and
your research informs your teaching. UM. So, I was planning
a course in my History of Medicine class I'm sorry,
(03:16):
a segment in my History of medicine class on William
Harvey's discovery of blood circulation. And it's a lecture I've
been giving many many times before, and I was getting
a little bit bored of it. So I decided I
was always planning my class, I would do a little
bit more reading around blood and um at that time,
the Philosophical Transactions, which are the main um which were
(03:41):
the main publications for the Royal Society at this time.
So in the m seventeenth century they were talking a
lot about blood and blood transfusion in the years following
Harvey and I thought blood transfusion. I had that same
response that you did, is what in the world. This
is the seventeenth century. So as I was looking at
(04:01):
this discovery of blood circulation, it led me to expand
out and to stumble, quite literally stumble on blood transfusion.
So it made for a really fun lecture because I
was also a student. I really was still trying to
find my way through the topic. And what's almost as
surprising as the fact that people were doing blood transfusions
this long ago, it was just learning what their previous
(04:23):
ideas about blood were. English physician William Harvey didn't discover
blood circulation and describe the circulatory system until the sixteen hundreds,
and his ideas were considered pretty radical at the time.
In her book, Tucker includes a good bit about the
historical notions about blood, which explains, among other things, why
blood letting was such a popular treatment for all sorts
(04:46):
of illnesses at the time, and she tells us a
little bit more about all of that. Here. What's really
interesting about the history blood transfusion is just how unlikely
it would have been for people to imagine putting blood
in because they had spent so long imagining all the
myriad ways to take blood out. And that was based
(05:07):
on longstanding notions of the body as this balance of
fluids and what they called They called them humors, and
these were notions. The humoral way of understanding the body
is something that began in antiquity with Galen Hippocrates. Those
are names that many people recognize. Galen and Hippocrates understood
the body to be this production of fluids, and when
(05:29):
you were healthy, you're humors, bile, blood, black bile, and
um phlegm. We're all in balance, and when you were sick,
it was out of balance. And one way that you
could adjust the humors was through nutrition. So if you
hadn't if your body was overly cold, you would eat
more warm humorlly warm food, um or. What you could
(05:52):
do is to sort of jump start that balance would
be to do blood letting, either through lancets or leeches,
all the all the things that we typically associate with
with early medicine, and that model had a specific um
influence on how blood was understood. First, blood didn't circulate.
They didn't know that blood circulated. Instead, blood was produced
in the digestive system. So what you ate food, It
(06:15):
was concocted was the word they used. Concocted in the stomach,
moved to the liver where it was distilled into the
life force of blood. Then the fluid blood would move
up to the heart, and the heart was seen something
as a furnace, so to provide heat and energy to
the body, the blood would be burned off, So it
made this one way trip to the heart essentially, And
(06:38):
so they didn't know yet about the relationship between the
uh pulmonary system and the cardiovascular system. So breathing was
simply a way to stoke the fires of the heart
and then um, when you breathe out of course, it
was to get rid of some of the some of
the smoke and I'm using quote fingers here, some of
the smoke produced by by the heart's fires. So hearing
(06:59):
all about the human mers and the coldness and warmness
of the body and keeping all of that in balance
made us wonder if that was the root of the
old thing that you feed a cold and starve a fever.
Here's what Hallie had to say. I think so in fact,
um feeding a cold starving a fever, because what you
don't want to do is, if you have a fever,
(07:19):
if your body is already humorrally hot, is to put
food in specifically hot food into your body. And that
would be something like steak and wine and things like that,
because your whole idea is to is to rebalance those
those humors. And the same thing with with feeding a cold. Um,
you would want to eat something like chicken soup where
(07:39):
it was very warm and warming to the body as
as a way to rebalance your humors. So, as I
mentioned in the beginning, rivalry is really at the center
of blood work, the national rivalry, the rivalry between doctors.
So we wanted to know how much of that rivalry
started with Harvey's discovery of circulation. Did the majority of
people still go along with the old ideas of humor
(08:03):
than of blood letting, or did they really pick up
the baton with Harvey's new idea. Well, it's interesting when
William Harvey discovers blood circulation in the sixteen twenties. He's
specifically wondering whether this idea of the humors as being
um the the definition of how blood is made, in
(08:24):
how it is used, is whether that's actually accurate or not,
And he determines, of course that it's not. Through a
whole variety of experiments in sight, he finally comes to
the conclusion that blood circulates, But that doesn't mean that
the humors go away. Once Harvey discovers circulation. Actually, to
the contrary, we know that blood letting and leeches and
lancets continue well into the nineteenth century. George Washington, for example,
(08:49):
was historians think he was pretty much blood let to
death right, because the whole understanding the body is this
is this humoral balance will continue. You. Now, Harvey was
attractive to many of the English thinkers, but he was
actually um considered too radical for the French. The French,
(09:11):
who were Catholic, deeply deeply conservative traditional both in the
religious and the political sense, but also the philosophical sense.
So when Harvey presents this idea of blood circulation, the
French are frankly outraged at it, and and and and
so the story of blood work, of the early blood
transfusions and the rivalries is set in the late sixteen sixties,
(09:34):
but the stage itself is created in the sixteen twenties
and sixteen thirties, precisely as you mentioned, with those rivalries
between the French and the English around this radical theory
of blood circulation. So hearing about how so many discovery
and advancements were going on in the Serena in England,
how is it that France is where the first blood
(09:57):
transfusion experiments with humans of taking place. That's what we
really wanted to know. How did that switch happen? And
she tells us a little bit more about that here.
So when William Harvey discovers blood circulation in sixteen um
that will slowly start the English too ponder what this
(10:19):
means and also want to confirm it. So men like
Christopher Wren, who we associate mostly as the great architect
of London, and Thomas will Willis, who we associates one
of the first people to do neurological studies, they engage
Harvey's idea of blood circulation as a way to um
(10:41):
see how how blood moves to the body and specifically
how it moves to the brain and doesn't move into
the brain, and so they're able to confirm Harvey's theory
and it's nothing but a theory at this point by
doing infusion studies. So they begin injecting animals, in particular
with any birth fluids, right, um, beer, wine, opium. And
(11:05):
the thought is is if Harvey is right and blood
makes this one way trip to the heart, is that
these drugs in an animal system won't have a lasting
effect because they'll be burned off immediately. But they start
to see that their animals are dying, they're sick, they're drunk.
So Harvey must have been onto something. Now the French
are watching with a bit of disgust, you know, it's
(11:28):
it's it's what the English are doing. Um. The English
um tend to be pretty radical. They're also fighting it
out on the battlefield. The French and the English have
experienced a long history of animosities and rivalries, so it
doesn't make a lot of sense. You're absolutely right that
the first human blood transfusion would be done in France
(11:49):
because they're so resistant. Well, what happens is that the
English start to move from circulation to infusion to transfusion,
because it makes sense if they finally started to think
about putting things into animals blood systems. Of course, maybe
what they want to do is to test it out
by transfusing the blood of one animal into another. And
(12:10):
that catches the attention of a man named Jean Baptiste Any,
a Frenchman who was not part of that French elite
that is so hostile to Harvey's theories of blood circulation
and also to the English more generally, because he wasn't
trained in Paris. Paris is the seat of traditional thinking.
(12:31):
It's this it's the place where all of the best
doctors go to train, and that training at the University
of Paris Medical School is a traditional training that is
built around Galen and Hippocrates. There's no room for any
thinking outside of that. But Denny was trained at the
rival school in the south of France in Montpellier, which
(12:53):
attracted more Protestants, and that also was more open to
um a coming, more open to Paracelsus, who was one
of the great alchemists, and more adventurous in a way.
So Denny learns of the English transfusion experiments and he
is now in Paris and wants desperately to make a
(13:15):
name for himself, and as someone who is not noble born,
he's actually from a very um modest family who was
not trained in Paris. The best way for him to
make a name for himself is to do what any
two year old would do, is to throw temper tantrum
and do that very thing that the that the parents
(13:35):
don't want the child to do, which is to engage
in one of the most distasteful types of experiments, and
that would be the blood transfusion experiments. And that's he
ends up replicating all of the English uh transfusion, animal
transfusion experiments and then um, just as the English we're
getting ready to perform their first human experiments, Deny scoops
(13:57):
them essentially does his own. So. Holly Tucker's book contains
a lot of details that pertain to class or status,
especially regarding its primary protagonist, Jean Peptiste de ni Now
we're talking. She includes details like people's clothing, their education, um,
the most minute things you wouldn't even think about, the
(14:18):
curtains on their carriage exactly. So we wanted to know
from her what role did class play in the story
about science and here's what she had to say. Oh, classes,
As you mentioned, everywhere, UM, one's ability to move through
society UM depended on both your money and your status.
(14:39):
In early France, we're at a moment particularly as well,
when Louis the fourteenth, the great son king who created Versailles,
of course, is in the process of strengthening his monarchy.
This he's doing this largely and in response to what
had been a horrific moment in France following the religious
(15:02):
wars between the Catholics and the Protestants UM in the
late sixteenth century. France also saw civil wars in the
early seventeenth century. So Louis the fourteenth comes in as
monarch and really wants to consolidate the power. And the
best way to consolidate power, right is to reaffies to
(15:23):
strengthen class structures. So he moves all of the nobles
out of Versailles where he can keep an eye on
them so they won't want to weaken the monarchy. And
the best way to keep an eye on them is
to UM create these rituals all around the king and
the king's body, so that the mont the nobility. At
(15:45):
this point, they're really fighting for each other, fighting for
the right one to be recognized in society and to
to be able to to be frank, to be able
to hold the king's um chamber pot So, so you know,
in this context the early beginnings of modern science UM
are beginning to form. Louis the fourteenth also, um is
(16:08):
uncomfortable with the idea that science, up until his reign,
had been localized primarily in private academies. So Deni's work
is actually financed by a very wealthy nobleman who four
years had attracted sciences brightest luminaries, Christian Huygens, who discovered rings,
(16:32):
the rings around Saturn. He just he announced that discovery
in um moment was his name, Mamo's academy. UM. Mama
tried to um recruit Renee dick Hart into his academy
and ended up settling for Decartes's rival, Pierre Gassondie. So
what happens right as as Denis is doing these blood transfusions,
(16:55):
he is getting supported by a man whose private academ
me had essentially been gutted by Louis the Fourteenth's decision
to move science into the state and to create the
French Academy of sciences. So there are, as you mentioned,
there are so many cultural and economic restraints on science
(17:20):
that Denis is really um renegade in many many ways
because he is budding against the the tide, if you will,
the political tides of the time. So I found the
figure of more More the Nobleman to be a really
fascinating part of the book, especially the limits that he
(17:41):
went to to try to establish, re establish his prestigious
the head of a private academy, going against going up
against the Sun King himself. And it's not as though
he's subtle about it either. Some of these blood experiments
are taking place in his own home in the center
of Paris. So we want to to hear from Holly
about where these other transfusions were happening all over the city,
(18:05):
who was observing them, and just what they were like.
I mean, what the nitty gritty of a seventeenth century
blood transfusion was really like. And here's what she had
to say. Um, most of these experiments from Harvey well
into the English experiments in the Royal Society, and then
of course Denise legendary and uh ill fated experiments on humans.
(18:28):
They're being done in private homes and uh I can't help.
But each time I go to Paris for people who
are in Paris. And if you stand in front of
the fountain at uh Sammy shed and you look down
the Sin towards the Louver on the left bank, there
are a few big buildings, Denny would have done those
(18:50):
in one of those buildings he would have also he
we know he did. He did very public experiments on
the banks of the Sin. So if you ever have
a chance to walk along the river in Paris, you
can imagine these well attended animal to animals, specifically dog
to dog experiments on the bank of the Scent, because
he moved it out of his own home into the
(19:10):
public realm as a way to get attention. Now as
the English are doing many of these in their own homes,
and Denia is doing this in his um, his residence
as well, on the bank of the banks of the Sin.
Louis the fourteenth creates the Academy of Sciences at the
very same time and then commissions his natural philosophers as
(19:34):
scientists were called to perform replications of the English experiments
in his library on the on the right bank, and
so there is one of the first times that we
see scientific experiments being done not just in a royal
context but in the king's own library, and the tools
(19:55):
that they were using, as you can imagine, we're really
quite rudimentary to do these experiment mints. All you would
really need, and for the moment we can talk about
the the animal experiments, all you would really need is
a big table onto which you could strap the animals
and a blood letting bowl for each of the animals,
(20:15):
and then some form of tubing. And the tubing was
again rudimentary. In the English experiments, they were using goose quills, right,
so they would slip a goose quill into the vein
or the artery of an animal, slip another goose quill
into the vein an artery of of of the donor
of the recipient, and then link those two together. The
English began creating metal tubes um and the and the
(20:40):
French decided they wanted to trump them, and they actually
did a double intake tube in the Academy of French
Academy of Sciences, where they could do transfusions that were simultaneous,
so uh the dog would be a recipient and a
donor at the same time. So in theory. The blood
would be flowing in two ways, um through the different
through the two tubes of the animals, so they were
(21:01):
really quite simplistic. You also needed a fireplace because you
wanted to keep the animals warm um and also keep
the blood warm so would continue flowing because blood clouding,
of course, was a huge problem in these experiments. Another
interesting aspect of the story is that Denny didn't just
perform one blood transfusion that caused all this controversy. He
(21:22):
had three very different subjects, which are sort of interesting
case studies in their own right. Tucker talks about them
a little bit more here. Denny did three experiments in
the end. The first was with a young boy who
had been feverish for about a month, and we're not
clear on how he found out about this boy. We're
(21:44):
also not clear on how he got the mother to
agree to let him perform a transfusion on her son.
But one thing we are sure of is that Denny
um transfused Lamb's blood into the boy's arteries. I'm sorry
to the boy's veins, and the boy did fine. He
(22:04):
didn't die. And that was the main criterion for success, right,
is whether there was death or not. Now the fever
was reduced, the boy was still very tired. Afterwards. We
suspect that there was a blood transfusion of blood in
compatibility reaction, but nothing huge. And people always ask, how
is it that someone could survive this? How could this
(22:25):
young boys survive this? There are three criteria for um
hemolytic reactions, so blood transfusion and compatibility reactions. The first
is how fast the blood goes in, And they're using
very again, rudimentary tools, so the blood is likely not
moving very fast because it's also clotting. So first, how
(22:46):
fast the blood moves in how much again not very
fast because it's clotting, not very much because it's clotting.
And then the third criteria is criterion is whether there's
been previous exposure. Of course, the boy had no previous
exposure to Lamb's blood, so it didn't move fast. There
wasn't a lot, and there had been no previous exposure.
And when you talk to um immunologists, they'll tell you
(23:09):
that the human body can really take a lot of
insult um. And there's no surprise among the physicians that
I consulted for this book that the boy could have
survived this. Now the second one is interesting because it's
here there is absolutely no therapeutic interest. It's purely experimental.
(23:29):
Is Deny Then, for the second transfusion, moves to a
butcher and I can't be sure, but I think the
butcher was the same butcher provided the sheep for the
first one, because the butcher in the first experiment was
really lively, very funny, gregarious um, and the butcher in
the second experiment um is the same um, same attitude.
(23:52):
In fact, after the blood transfusion, and of course the
sheep is is dead, he goes, hey, what are you
gonna do with that? You can I take it home, Um,
either to sell it or to eat it. And Denis says, well, yeah,
sure we know that. In the second case, is that
the butcher was paid because Denny, after the experiment, is
(24:12):
feeling pretty good about himself, is walking through the streets
of his neighborhood and looks into a tavern. For some
reason catches his eye and he sees his butcher that
he just transfused, drunk as a skunk, and storms the
tavern to yell at his patients, saying, what are you
doing well? The the gregarious Butcher throws his arms around
Denny and says, look at me, I'm feeling great. And
(24:35):
the Butcher's friends, I'll say, hey, you know, give me
one of these transfusions, give me some money. And so
he now has not only not killed his patients, but
he's creating the name for himself that he desperately wants
to have, and he has patients ready willing and lined
up the third transfusion. Interestingly, he doesn't reach for any
(24:56):
of those volunteers. But with the nobleman Beaumour, who was
financing his experiments, they decided that the next step then
would be to take the most famous man in Paris.
In fact, the most notoriously famous man in Paris, um
man named Antoine Moroix, who ran the streets regularly naked, delirious.
(25:19):
Um He was considered the madman of the most elite
neighborhood of Paris. And they pluck him off of the streets,
of course, against his will, tie him up, and transfuse
him with interestingly, not lambs blood this time, but uh,
cow blood, and the first transfusion goes pretty well. Um
(25:41):
Maroi is calmed. Now it was likely he was just
very sick, but he's calmed down. They decided to try
a second one. He's even more calm likely even more
sick um, and they end up sending him home to
this hovel of village shock that he lives in, back
to his wife and uh. Later a few months later,
(26:04):
the wife comes storming to denise door and says, my
husband's at it again. He is delusional, he's going crazy.
You need to transfuse him with with blood again. And Denny,
of course, esus is a wonderful opportunity to try it again.
He goes out to the village, begins to transfusion um mahroa,
begins having seizures. It's not clear whether and how much
(26:26):
blood may have been transfused, and the next day the
man is dead and Denise will later be called up
on murder charges. So this is where the mystery really begins,
the one that Holly is trying to solve throughout the
course of this book. The madman has been murdered. But
why what were the motives behind this crime? We didn't
want to give away the who done it aspect of it,
(26:48):
because why would you want to read the book if
we did that? But we did want to get a
little bit more into who might have done it, And
here's what she had to say, Well, the motives actually
go back to a question that I know a lot
of people ask when they hear the story, is why
in the world were they're using animal blood? Right? And
that is actually at the heart of the murder charges essentially,
(27:11):
and the and the outcome of this. For transfusionists like
Denny and for many of the transfusionists in England, it
made perfect sense because animal flesh and fluid had long
been used for therapeutics. So if I going back to
the humors, if I was feeling overly, overly cold as
(27:33):
far as you know, being very flummy in the humoral sense,
I might reach for a raw steak, big glass of
wine um to be able to bolster my system. The
same thing with fruits and vegetables. It's very It's very
interesting is that all different types of conception manuals um
will tell you that if you want to have a
(27:55):
baby boy, baby boys are men are considered humorally to
be hot. What you would do is is reach for
things like staged testicles and you would dry them and
powder them and sprinkle them on your food as a
way to bolster your humorl system is to make your
body hotter so than when it came time to conceive,
(28:17):
and be more likely to conceive a boy. So animals
had long been used as as medicine essentially. And there's
a second element is that there's a man named Rene Descartes,
a philosopher in the sixteen thirties. Of course he's famous
to us now, because all we have to do is
say Descartes, I think therefore I am de cart put forth.
(28:39):
A radical theory is that animal bodies and human bodies
are identical. They function more or less like machines. The
only difference between animals, to decart the only difference between
animal and human bodies is that humans can speak, they
can reason, and they have souls. And Descartes says, all
of those attributes that make as human actually are not
(29:01):
lodged at all in the body. Now, it was highly contested.
Descartes spent much of his life in Holland in exile
because his theories of blood circulation was a radical theory.
So was descartes idea. So it was thought that if
de cart is right, then transfusing animal blood into humans
(29:21):
would be little more than changing the oil in a car. Right,
But the fear is what if de cart is wrong?
What if there's something in animal blood that is specifically animal,
and what if animals have souls? What if all of
that is in this red fluid and we're now moving
into humans. Could humans begin taking on animal attributes and
(29:45):
then vice versa. If we start to move human blood
into animals, could science now have the means to create
through blood transfusion, through blood transfere could it? Could it
create hybrid species? Monster ers? That was a frightening proposition, right,
It seems ridiculous to us, but at the time the
(30:06):
greatest thinkers were terrified of that prospect, and Dennie needed
to be stopped. So at the heart of um the
Murder Trial is that there was a plot essentially um
as I, as I uncover in the book. Deni was
acquitted of murder, but it was clear that the patient
(30:27):
had been murdered by Arsenic with the help of three physicians,
and so I spent a lot of time trying to
figure out what in the world that would mean. And
sure enough, with a speculation that possibly this, this fear
of hybrid species was underlying it all, and sure enough
once I was able to uncover the the murderers. It's
(30:48):
it's glaring is that they set Dennie up as a
way to to save the human species. It's a noble cause,
isn't it. So finally, when we were kind of wrapping
up our interview, we're gonna have a part two as well,
by the way, But when we were wrapping up our interview,
we told Holly that one of these episodes would be
the culmination of our October Halloween series, because, after all,
(31:13):
blood and monsters pretty great combo. And she was amused
by that, unfortunately, and offered one last take on this
tale of medicine and murder, which we thought was really fun.
I think we have a tendency to look at look
at scientists both as being very important in making all
these great breakthroughs, but there's always this deep fear that
(31:36):
underlying underlying all science and then the hearts of scientists
is this deep you know, Dr Jekyl Frankenstein element, which
I don't I don't think it's true, but Jean Baptiste
den essentially represents that as well as he's he's questing
for the greatest answers of of nature. But at the
same time, could he be um ruining the human species?
(31:58):
Um So he's some thing of an early example of
Dr Frankenstein, if you will. So there you have at Frankenstein.
It doesn't get anymore HALLOWEENI than that. And Dr Chucklin Mr.
Hyde a pretty great spooky combo. So it was really
fun to talk to Holly about the book and the
(32:18):
story behind the book, but we also wanted to hear
some about how she went about researching it, how she
went about solving that cold case. And we're saving that
part for a second half of this interview, so you
can tune in and a couple of weeks maybe and
check out that. And it's just exciting as the other stuff,
if not more. It really is. It is like Super
(32:40):
Adventures and the Archives essentially, with a little bit of
frustration in there too. But we hope we've given you
a little bit about Blood to go on in case
you're planning your Halloween costume for this here and blood
is a part of it. I mean, if you go
out and pick up the book in time, you might
even be able to incorporate some of the details from
it and your costume. Maybe you'll go as William Harvey
(33:01):
buy some goose quills, yes, but we wouldn't recommend trying
any of these experiments at home, although they might have
done that in the seventeenth century. But if you do
get a chance to pick up the book, we'd like to,
As we did with the McCulla book recently, we'd like
to start a little discussion of it. Please hit us
up on social media. We're on Facebook or on Twitter
at Miston History, or you can always email us at
(33:22):
History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. We'd love
to get a little discussion going about what you like
about the book, um, what was surprising to you, or
if there's anything else you just want to know about
blood or blood circulation or blood transfusions. Please write to
us and we will try to find the answers for you,
but they may be answered in the next episode, so
you might went away, so stay tuned and UM. In
(33:44):
the meantime, you can go and check out medical type
topics on our own website at www dot how stuff
works dot com. Be sure to check out our new
video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how stu Work
staff off as we explore the most promising and perplexing
possibilities of tomorrow. The House of Works iPhone app has
(34:06):
a ride. Download it today on iTunes, M
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm to Blaine and Chuck reporting,
and we have a another very special October Halloween Spooky
(00:21):
episode for you today. This time it is an interview.
In fact, yes, we did something really cool recently. Last month,
we went to the Decatur Book Festival right here in Georgia,
and we got the chance to see Holly Tucker, who
was an associate professor at Vanderbilt University, talk about her
new book, which is called blood Work, A Tale of
(00:42):
Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution. So we went
into it excited about it, but thinking, Okay, this is
going to be a book all about the history of
blood and blood circulation and blood transfusions. But what we
found was so so much more. Well. Yeah, and because
Holly's interview was as part of the Atlanta Science Taverns
First Science Track at the Decatur Book Festival, I had
(01:05):
a suspicion that there would be more than just just
sort of a straight medical story. And I mean there
is a lot more their monsters. There's murder obviously in
the title, and Um, the thing that surprised me most
about the book and about Holly's lecture though, is that
the history of blood transfusion starts so much earlier than
(01:26):
you would expect. I guess that's the first Uh, maybe
a little disturbing fact about the book. I mean it
starts off in the six hundreds. Yeah, just to give
you a brief rundown, it's about the very first blood
human blood transfusion, which took place in the sixteen hundreds,
and the man who performed them and how his experiments
were kind of shut down, and the mystery, the murder
(01:50):
mystery surrounding well. In this rivalry too, there are a
lot of rivalries that play between France where the first
transfusion took place, in England where the early your experiments
in blood transfusions with animals took place, and um, just
rivalry among the doctors in France too. So there's a
lot going on. And then there are some really pretty
(02:11):
horrific experiments. So I think you guys are gonna like
this and like hearing about sort of a Dr Frankenstein
sort of sort of medical history. Yeah, it's definitely a
monster story. And Holly Tucker took us through this for
about forty five minutes, and we were riveted in our chairs,
and not just by the story, but by her too.
(02:32):
She's such a cool person with a enviewable career that
we will discuss more later, but first we want to
start with the story. Yeah, and the first question we
wanted to ask her was how did she find something
like this, because, as we just mentioned, we were surprised
that the history of blood transfusion started in the seventeenth century.
How did Holly stumble upon this? Here's what she had
(02:56):
to say. Well, the best thing about being a university
professor is that you teach, and when it works really well. Um,
and especially a place like Manderbelt often does, is that
what you do in the classroom informs your research, and
your research informs your teaching. UM. So, I was planning
a course in my History of Medicine class I'm sorry,
(03:16):
a segment in my History of medicine class on William
Harvey's discovery of blood circulation. And it's a lecture I've
been giving many many times before, and I was getting
a little bit bored of it. So I decided I
was always planning my class, I would do a little
bit more reading around blood and um at that time,
the Philosophical Transactions, which are the main um which were
(03:41):
the main publications for the Royal Society at this time.
So in the m seventeenth century they were talking a
lot about blood and blood transfusion in the years following
Harvey and I thought blood transfusion. I had that same
response that you did, is what in the world. This
is the seventeenth century. So as I was looking at
(04:01):
this discovery of blood circulation, it led me to expand
out and to stumble, quite literally stumble on blood transfusion.
So it made for a really fun lecture because I
was also a student. I really was still trying to
find my way through the topic. And what's almost as
surprising as the fact that people were doing blood transfusions
this long ago, it was just learning what their previous
(04:23):
ideas about blood were. English physician William Harvey didn't discover
blood circulation and describe the circulatory system until the sixteen hundreds,
and his ideas were considered pretty radical at the time.
In her book, Tucker includes a good bit about the
historical notions about blood, which explains, among other things, why
blood letting was such a popular treatment for all sorts
(04:46):
of illnesses at the time, and she tells us a
little bit more about all of that. Here. What's really
interesting about the history blood transfusion is just how unlikely
it would have been for people to imagine putting blood
in because they had spent so long imagining all the
myriad ways to take blood out. And that was based
(05:07):
on longstanding notions of the body as this balance of
fluids and what they called They called them humors, and
these were notions. The humoral way of understanding the body
is something that began in antiquity with Galen Hippocrates. Those
are names that many people recognize. Galen and Hippocrates understood
the body to be this production of fluids, and when
(05:29):
you were healthy, you're humors, bile, blood, black bile, and
um phlegm. We're all in balance, and when you were sick,
it was out of balance. And one way that you
could adjust the humors was through nutrition. So if you
hadn't if your body was overly cold, you would eat
more warm humorlly warm food, um or. What you could
(05:52):
do is to sort of jump start that balance would
be to do blood letting, either through lancets or leeches,
all the all the things that we typically associate with
with early medicine, and that model had a specific um
influence on how blood was understood. First, blood didn't circulate.
They didn't know that blood circulated. Instead, blood was produced
in the digestive system. So what you ate food, It
(06:15):
was concocted was the word they used. Concocted in the stomach,
moved to the liver where it was distilled into the
life force of blood. Then the fluid blood would move
up to the heart, and the heart was seen something
as a furnace, so to provide heat and energy to
the body, the blood would be burned off, So it
made this one way trip to the heart essentially, And
(06:38):
so they didn't know yet about the relationship between the
uh pulmonary system and the cardiovascular system. So breathing was
simply a way to stoke the fires of the heart
and then um, when you breathe out of course, it
was to get rid of some of the some of
the smoke and I'm using quote fingers here, some of
the smoke produced by by the heart's fires. So hearing
(06:59):
all about the human mers and the coldness and warmness
of the body and keeping all of that in balance
made us wonder if that was the root of the
old thing that you feed a cold and starve a fever.
Here's what Hallie had to say. I think so in fact,
um feeding a cold starving a fever, because what you
don't want to do is, if you have a fever,
(07:19):
if your body is already humorrally hot, is to put
food in specifically hot food into your body. And that
would be something like steak and wine and things like that,
because your whole idea is to is to rebalance those
those humors. And the same thing with with feeding a cold. Um,
you would want to eat something like chicken soup where
(07:39):
it was very warm and warming to the body as
as a way to rebalance your humors. So, as I
mentioned in the beginning, rivalry is really at the center
of blood work, the national rivalry, the rivalry between doctors.
So we wanted to know how much of that rivalry
started with Harvey's discovery of circulation. Did the majority of
people still go along with the old ideas of humor
(08:03):
than of blood letting, or did they really pick up
the baton with Harvey's new idea. Well, it's interesting when
William Harvey discovers blood circulation in the sixteen twenties. He's
specifically wondering whether this idea of the humors as being
um the the definition of how blood is made, in
(08:24):
how it is used, is whether that's actually accurate or not,
And he determines, of course that it's not. Through a
whole variety of experiments in sight, he finally comes to
the conclusion that blood circulates, But that doesn't mean that
the humors go away. Once Harvey discovers circulation. Actually, to
the contrary, we know that blood letting and leeches and
lancets continue well into the nineteenth century. George Washington, for example,
(08:49):
was historians think he was pretty much blood let to
death right, because the whole understanding the body is this
is this humoral balance will continue. You. Now, Harvey was
attractive to many of the English thinkers, but he was
actually um considered too radical for the French. The French,
(09:11):
who were Catholic, deeply deeply conservative traditional both in the
religious and the political sense, but also the philosophical sense.
So when Harvey presents this idea of blood circulation, the
French are frankly outraged at it, and and and and
so the story of blood work, of the early blood
transfusions and the rivalries is set in the late sixteen sixties,
(09:34):
but the stage itself is created in the sixteen twenties
and sixteen thirties, precisely as you mentioned, with those rivalries
between the French and the English around this radical theory
of blood circulation. So hearing about how so many discovery
and advancements were going on in the Serena in England,
how is it that France is where the first blood
(09:57):
transfusion experiments with humans of taking place. That's what we
really wanted to know. How did that switch happen? And
she tells us a little bit more about that here.
So when William Harvey discovers blood circulation in sixteen um
that will slowly start the English too ponder what this
(10:19):
means and also want to confirm it. So men like
Christopher Wren, who we associate mostly as the great architect
of London, and Thomas will Willis, who we associates one
of the first people to do neurological studies, they engage
Harvey's idea of blood circulation as a way to um
(10:41):
see how how blood moves to the body and specifically
how it moves to the brain and doesn't move into
the brain, and so they're able to confirm Harvey's theory
and it's nothing but a theory at this point by
doing infusion studies. So they begin injecting animals, in particular
with any birth fluids, right, um, beer, wine, opium. And
(11:05):
the thought is is if Harvey is right and blood
makes this one way trip to the heart, is that
these drugs in an animal system won't have a lasting
effect because they'll be burned off immediately. But they start
to see that their animals are dying, they're sick, they're drunk.
So Harvey must have been onto something. Now the French
are watching with a bit of disgust, you know, it's
(11:28):
it's it's what the English are doing. Um. The English
um tend to be pretty radical. They're also fighting it
out on the battlefield. The French and the English have
experienced a long history of animosities and rivalries, so it
doesn't make a lot of sense. You're absolutely right that
the first human blood transfusion would be done in France
(11:49):
because they're so resistant. Well, what happens is that the
English start to move from circulation to infusion to transfusion,
because it makes sense if they finally started to think
about putting things into animals blood systems. Of course, maybe
what they want to do is to test it out
by transfusing the blood of one animal into another. And
(12:10):
that catches the attention of a man named Jean Baptiste Any,
a Frenchman who was not part of that French elite
that is so hostile to Harvey's theories of blood circulation
and also to the English more generally, because he wasn't
trained in Paris. Paris is the seat of traditional thinking.
(12:31):
It's this it's the place where all of the best
doctors go to train, and that training at the University
of Paris Medical School is a traditional training that is
built around Galen and Hippocrates. There's no room for any
thinking outside of that. But Denny was trained at the
rival school in the south of France in Montpellier, which
(12:53):
attracted more Protestants, and that also was more open to
um a coming, more open to Paracelsus, who was one
of the great alchemists, and more adventurous in a way.
So Denny learns of the English transfusion experiments and he
is now in Paris and wants desperately to make a
(13:15):
name for himself, and as someone who is not noble born,
he's actually from a very um modest family who was
not trained in Paris. The best way for him to
make a name for himself is to do what any
two year old would do, is to throw temper tantrum
and do that very thing that the that the parents
(13:35):
don't want the child to do, which is to engage
in one of the most distasteful types of experiments, and
that would be the blood transfusion experiments. And that's he
ends up replicating all of the English uh transfusion, animal
transfusion experiments and then um, just as the English we're
getting ready to perform their first human experiments, Deny scoops
(13:57):
them essentially does his own. So. Holly Tucker's book contains
a lot of details that pertain to class or status,
especially regarding its primary protagonist, Jean Peptiste de ni Now
we're talking. She includes details like people's clothing, their education, um,
the most minute things you wouldn't even think about, the
(14:18):
curtains on their carriage exactly. So we wanted to know
from her what role did class play in the story
about science and here's what she had to say. Oh, classes,
As you mentioned, everywhere, UM, one's ability to move through
society UM depended on both your money and your status.
(14:39):
In early France, we're at a moment particularly as well,
when Louis the fourteenth, the great son king who created Versailles,
of course, is in the process of strengthening his monarchy.
This he's doing this largely and in response to what
had been a horrific moment in France following the religious
(15:02):
wars between the Catholics and the Protestants UM in the
late sixteenth century. France also saw civil wars in the
early seventeenth century. So Louis the fourteenth comes in as
monarch and really wants to consolidate the power. And the
best way to consolidate power, right is to reaffies to
(15:23):
strengthen class structures. So he moves all of the nobles
out of Versailles where he can keep an eye on
them so they won't want to weaken the monarchy. And
the best way to keep an eye on them is
to UM create these rituals all around the king and
the king's body, so that the mont the nobility. At
(15:45):
this point, they're really fighting for each other, fighting for
the right one to be recognized in society and to
to be able to to be frank, to be able
to hold the king's um chamber pot So, so you know,
in this context the early beginnings of modern science UM
are beginning to form. Louis the fourteenth also, um is
(16:08):
uncomfortable with the idea that science, up until his reign,
had been localized primarily in private academies. So Deni's work
is actually financed by a very wealthy nobleman who four
years had attracted sciences brightest luminaries, Christian Huygens, who discovered rings,
(16:32):
the rings around Saturn. He just he announced that discovery
in um moment was his name, Mamo's academy. UM. Mama
tried to um recruit Renee dick Hart into his academy
and ended up settling for Decartes's rival, Pierre Gassondie. So
what happens right as as Denis is doing these blood transfusions,
(16:55):
he is getting supported by a man whose private academ
me had essentially been gutted by Louis the Fourteenth's decision
to move science into the state and to create the
French Academy of sciences. So there are, as you mentioned,
there are so many cultural and economic restraints on science
(17:20):
that Denis is really um renegade in many many ways
because he is budding against the the tide, if you will,
the political tides of the time. So I found the
figure of more More the Nobleman to be a really
fascinating part of the book, especially the limits that he
(17:41):
went to to try to establish, re establish his prestigious
the head of a private academy, going against going up
against the Sun King himself. And it's not as though
he's subtle about it either. Some of these blood experiments
are taking place in his own home in the center
of Paris. So we want to to hear from Holly
about where these other transfusions were happening all over the city,
(18:05):
who was observing them, and just what they were like.
I mean, what the nitty gritty of a seventeenth century
blood transfusion was really like. And here's what she had
to say. Um, most of these experiments from Harvey well
into the English experiments in the Royal Society, and then
of course Denise legendary and uh ill fated experiments on humans.
(18:28):
They're being done in private homes and uh I can't help.
But each time I go to Paris for people who
are in Paris. And if you stand in front of
the fountain at uh Sammy shed and you look down
the Sin towards the Louver on the left bank, there
are a few big buildings, Denny would have done those
(18:50):
in one of those buildings he would have also he
we know he did. He did very public experiments on
the banks of the Sin. So if you ever have
a chance to walk along the river in Paris, you
can imagine these well attended animal to animals, specifically dog
to dog experiments on the bank of the Scent, because
he moved it out of his own home into the
(19:10):
public realm as a way to get attention. Now as
the English are doing many of these in their own homes,
and Denia is doing this in his um, his residence
as well, on the bank of the banks of the Sin.
Louis the fourteenth creates the Academy of Sciences at the
very same time and then commissions his natural philosophers as
(19:34):
scientists were called to perform replications of the English experiments
in his library on the on the right bank, and
so there is one of the first times that we
see scientific experiments being done not just in a royal
context but in the king's own library, and the tools
(19:55):
that they were using, as you can imagine, we're really
quite rudimentary to do these experiment mints. All you would
really need, and for the moment we can talk about
the the animal experiments, all you would really need is
a big table onto which you could strap the animals
and a blood letting bowl for each of the animals,
(20:15):
and then some form of tubing. And the tubing was
again rudimentary. In the English experiments, they were using goose quills, right,
so they would slip a goose quill into the vein
or the artery of an animal, slip another goose quill
into the vein an artery of of of the donor
of the recipient, and then link those two together. The
English began creating metal tubes um and the and the
(20:40):
French decided they wanted to trump them, and they actually
did a double intake tube in the Academy of French
Academy of Sciences, where they could do transfusions that were simultaneous,
so uh the dog would be a recipient and a
donor at the same time. So in theory. The blood
would be flowing in two ways, um through the different
through the two tubes of the animals, so they were
(21:01):
really quite simplistic. You also needed a fireplace because you
wanted to keep the animals warm um and also keep
the blood warm so would continue flowing because blood clouding,
of course, was a huge problem in these experiments. Another
interesting aspect of the story is that Denny didn't just
perform one blood transfusion that caused all this controversy. He
(21:22):
had three very different subjects, which are sort of interesting
case studies in their own right. Tucker talks about them
a little bit more here. Denny did three experiments in
the end. The first was with a young boy who
had been feverish for about a month, and we're not
clear on how he found out about this boy. We're
(21:44):
also not clear on how he got the mother to
agree to let him perform a transfusion on her son.
But one thing we are sure of is that Denny
um transfused Lamb's blood into the boy's arteries. I'm sorry
to the boy's veins, and the boy did fine. He
(22:04):
didn't die. And that was the main criterion for success, right,
is whether there was death or not. Now the fever
was reduced, the boy was still very tired. Afterwards. We
suspect that there was a blood transfusion of blood in
compatibility reaction, but nothing huge. And people always ask, how
is it that someone could survive this? How could this
(22:25):
young boys survive this? There are three criteria for um
hemolytic reactions, so blood transfusion and compatibility reactions. The first
is how fast the blood goes in, And they're using
very again, rudimentary tools, so the blood is likely not
moving very fast because it's also clotting. So first, how
(22:46):
fast the blood moves in how much again not very
fast because it's clotting, not very much because it's clotting.
And then the third criteria is criterion is whether there's
been previous exposure. Of course, the boy had no previous
exposure to Lamb's blood, so it didn't move fast. There
wasn't a lot, and there had been no previous exposure.
And when you talk to um immunologists, they'll tell you
(23:09):
that the human body can really take a lot of
insult um. And there's no surprise among the physicians that
I consulted for this book that the boy could have
survived this. Now the second one is interesting because it's
here there is absolutely no therapeutic interest. It's purely experimental.
(23:29):
Is Deny Then, for the second transfusion, moves to a
butcher and I can't be sure, but I think the
butcher was the same butcher provided the sheep for the
first one, because the butcher in the first experiment was
really lively, very funny, gregarious um, and the butcher in
the second experiment um is the same um, same attitude.
(23:52):
In fact, after the blood transfusion, and of course the
sheep is is dead, he goes, hey, what are you
gonna do with that? You can I take it home, Um,
either to sell it or to eat it. And Denis says, well, yeah,
sure we know that. In the second case, is that
the butcher was paid because Denny, after the experiment, is
(24:12):
feeling pretty good about himself, is walking through the streets
of his neighborhood and looks into a tavern. For some
reason catches his eye and he sees his butcher that
he just transfused, drunk as a skunk, and storms the
tavern to yell at his patients, saying, what are you
doing well? The the gregarious Butcher throws his arms around
Denny and says, look at me, I'm feeling great. And
(24:35):
the Butcher's friends, I'll say, hey, you know, give me
one of these transfusions, give me some money. And so
he now has not only not killed his patients, but
he's creating the name for himself that he desperately wants
to have, and he has patients ready willing and lined
up the third transfusion. Interestingly, he doesn't reach for any
(24:56):
of those volunteers. But with the nobleman Beaumour, who was
financing his experiments, they decided that the next step then
would be to take the most famous man in Paris.
In fact, the most notoriously famous man in Paris, um
man named Antoine Moroix, who ran the streets regularly naked, delirious.
(25:19):
Um He was considered the madman of the most elite
neighborhood of Paris. And they pluck him off of the streets,
of course, against his will, tie him up, and transfuse
him with interestingly, not lambs blood this time, but uh,
cow blood, and the first transfusion goes pretty well. Um
(25:41):
Maroi is calmed. Now it was likely he was just
very sick, but he's calmed down. They decided to try
a second one. He's even more calm likely even more
sick um, and they end up sending him home to
this hovel of village shock that he lives in, back
to his wife and uh. Later a few months later,
(26:04):
the wife comes storming to denise door and says, my
husband's at it again. He is delusional, he's going crazy.
You need to transfuse him with with blood again. And Denny,
of course, esus is a wonderful opportunity to try it again.
He goes out to the village, begins to transfusion um mahroa,
begins having seizures. It's not clear whether and how much
(26:26):
blood may have been transfused, and the next day the
man is dead and Denise will later be called up
on murder charges. So this is where the mystery really begins,
the one that Holly is trying to solve throughout the
course of this book. The madman has been murdered. But
why what were the motives behind this crime? We didn't
want to give away the who done it aspect of it,
(26:48):
because why would you want to read the book if
we did that? But we did want to get a
little bit more into who might have done it, And
here's what she had to say, Well, the motives actually
go back to a question that I know a lot
of people ask when they hear the story, is why
in the world were they're using animal blood? Right? And
that is actually at the heart of the murder charges essentially,
(27:11):
and the and the outcome of this. For transfusionists like
Denny and for many of the transfusionists in England, it
made perfect sense because animal flesh and fluid had long
been used for therapeutics. So if I going back to
the humors, if I was feeling overly, overly cold as
(27:33):
far as you know, being very flummy in the humoral sense,
I might reach for a raw steak, big glass of
wine um to be able to bolster my system. The
same thing with fruits and vegetables. It's very It's very
interesting is that all different types of conception manuals um
will tell you that if you want to have a
(27:55):
baby boy, baby boys are men are considered humorally to
be hot. What you would do is is reach for
things like staged testicles and you would dry them and
powder them and sprinkle them on your food as a
way to bolster your humorl system is to make your
body hotter so than when it came time to conceive,
(28:17):
and be more likely to conceive a boy. So animals
had long been used as as medicine essentially. And there's
a second element is that there's a man named Rene Descartes,
a philosopher in the sixteen thirties. Of course he's famous
to us now, because all we have to do is
say Descartes, I think therefore I am de cart put forth.
(28:39):
A radical theory is that animal bodies and human bodies
are identical. They function more or less like machines. The
only difference between animals, to decart the only difference between
animal and human bodies is that humans can speak, they
can reason, and they have souls. And Descartes says, all
of those attributes that make as human actually are not
(29:01):
lodged at all in the body. Now, it was highly contested.
Descartes spent much of his life in Holland in exile
because his theories of blood circulation was a radical theory.
So was descartes idea. So it was thought that if
de cart is right, then transfusing animal blood into humans
(29:21):
would be little more than changing the oil in a car. Right,
But the fear is what if de cart is wrong?
What if there's something in animal blood that is specifically animal,
and what if animals have souls? What if all of
that is in this red fluid and we're now moving
into humans. Could humans begin taking on animal attributes and
(29:45):
then vice versa. If we start to move human blood
into animals, could science now have the means to create
through blood transfusion, through blood transfere could it? Could it
create hybrid species? Monster ers? That was a frightening proposition, right,
It seems ridiculous to us, but at the time the
(30:06):
greatest thinkers were terrified of that prospect, and Dennie needed
to be stopped. So at the heart of um the
Murder Trial is that there was a plot essentially um
as I, as I uncover in the book. Deni was
acquitted of murder, but it was clear that the patient
(30:27):
had been murdered by Arsenic with the help of three physicians,
and so I spent a lot of time trying to
figure out what in the world that would mean. And
sure enough, with a speculation that possibly this, this fear
of hybrid species was underlying it all, and sure enough
once I was able to uncover the the murderers. It's
(30:48):
it's glaring is that they set Dennie up as a
way to to save the human species. It's a noble cause,
isn't it. So finally, when we were kind of wrapping
up our interview, we're gonna have a part two as well,
by the way, But when we were wrapping up our interview,
we told Holly that one of these episodes would be
the culmination of our October Halloween series, because, after all,
(31:13):
blood and monsters pretty great combo. And she was amused
by that, unfortunately, and offered one last take on this
tale of medicine and murder, which we thought was really fun.
I think we have a tendency to look at look
at scientists both as being very important in making all
these great breakthroughs, but there's always this deep fear that
(31:36):
underlying underlying all science and then the hearts of scientists
is this deep you know, Dr Jekyl Frankenstein element, which
I don't I don't think it's true, but Jean Baptiste
den essentially represents that as well as he's he's questing
for the greatest answers of of nature. But at the
same time, could he be um ruining the human species?
(31:58):
Um So he's some thing of an early example of
Dr Frankenstein, if you will. So there you have at Frankenstein.
It doesn't get anymore HALLOWEENI than that. And Dr Chucklin Mr.
Hyde a pretty great spooky combo. So it was really
fun to talk to Holly about the book and the
(32:18):
story behind the book, but we also wanted to hear
some about how she went about researching it, how she
went about solving that cold case. And we're saving that
part for a second half of this interview, so you
can tune in and a couple of weeks maybe and
check out that. And it's just exciting as the other stuff,
if not more. It really is. It is like Super
(32:40):
Adventures and the Archives essentially, with a little bit of
frustration in there too. But we hope we've given you
a little bit about Blood to go on in case
you're planning your Halloween costume for this here and blood
is a part of it. I mean, if you go
out and pick up the book in time, you might
even be able to incorporate some of the details from
it and your costume. Maybe you'll go as William Harvey
(33:01):
buy some goose quills, yes, but we wouldn't recommend trying
any of these experiments at home, although they might have
done that in the seventeenth century. But if you do
get a chance to pick up the book, we'd like to,
As we did with the McCulla book recently, we'd like
to start a little discussion of it. Please hit us
up on social media. We're on Facebook or on Twitter
at Miston History, or you can always email us at
(33:22):
History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. We'd love
to get a little discussion going about what you like
about the book, um, what was surprising to you, or
if there's anything else you just want to know about
blood or blood circulation or blood transfusions. Please write to
us and we will try to find the answers for you,
but they may be answered in the next episode, so
you might went away, so stay tuned and UM. In
(33:44):
the meantime, you can go and check out medical type
topics on our own website at www dot how stuff
works dot com. Be sure to check out our new
video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how stu Work
staff off as we explore the most promising and perplexing
possibilities of tomorrow. The House of Works iPhone app has
(34:06):
a ride. Download it today on iTunes, M
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Tracy Wilson
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