Samuel Pepys records the first description of a blood transfusion - November 14th, 1666

On this day in 1666, English diarist and politician Samuel Pepys wrote the first known description of a blood transfusion.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class,
a show that infuses a little history into the blood
stream of your day. I'm Gabe Lousier, and in this

(00:22):
episode we're talking about a notable diary entry that gave
the world its first description of a gruesome new medical procedure,
the blood transfusion. The day was November sixteen sixty six.

(00:48):
English diarist and politician Samuel Peeps wrote the first known
description of a blood transfusion. He had overheard the story
of the medical experiment while having dinner at a London pub.
Peeps was administrator for the Royal Navy and a member
of Parliament, but he's best remembered today for his many

(01:10):
detailed diary entries, which offer a rare look at daily
life in London during the turbulent mid seventeenth century. Peeps
wrote extensively on notable city events such as the Great
Fire and the Great Plague, but he also wrote about
everyday life and sometimes about medical breakthroughs that he heard

(01:31):
about second hand in a pub. As far as we know,
the blood transfusion Peeps wrote about was only the second
such procedure in the world. The first was performed a
year earlier by a physician named Richard Lower. In both cases,
the blood transfusion was carried out between two dogs, and

(01:52):
in both cases the donor dog did not survive the procedure.
These successful transfusions or half successful, occurred just over forty
years after William Harvey proved that it's the pumping action
of the heart that circulates blood through the body. It's
worth noting that an Arab physician named Ibben al Nafists

(02:15):
had proposed a similar notion in the thirteenth century, but
most European researchers of the era didn't have access to
his writings. As a result, prior to Harvey, most Western
physicians adhered to the ancient Greek belief that the liver
was the organ that circulates blood. In fact, medical understanding

(02:37):
of the circulatory system was so poor that when Pope
Innocent the Eighth was on his deathbed in his doctor
tried to orally administer fresh blood to keep the pope alive,
and no it didn't work. As soon as Harvey published
his findings in the early sixteen hundreds, the medical community

(02:58):
became fixated on the possibility of adding blood to a
person's body to replace blood that had been lost. Physicians
started designing instruments for such a procedure and began experimenting
on animals. Richard Lower performed the first successful dog to
dog transfusion in sixteen sixty five, but his account of

(03:20):
that experiment wasn't published until over a year later, about
a month after Samuel Peeps wrote his diary entry. On
the night of November, Peeps stopped by the Pope's Head
Pub after visiting his wife's sick brother. He met up
with some friends who had just come from a Royal
Society meeting where they had witnessed the world second successful

(03:42):
blood transfusion. The procedure, though scientific in nature, was grizzly. Nonetheless,
the dogs were tied down and the arteries and veins
and their necks were opened. Blood was transferred from one
dog to the other through goose their quills inserted into
the blood vessels. Peeps recounted his friend's observations, writing quote,

(04:08):
the experiment of transfusing the blood of one dog into
another was made before the Society by Mr King and
Mr Thomas Cox, upon a little mastiff and a spaniel
with very good success, the former bleeding to death, and
the latter receiving the blood of the other and emitting

(04:28):
so much of his own as to make him capable
of receiving that of the other. This did give occasion
to many pretty wishes, as of the blood of a
Quaker to be let into an archbishop, and such like.
But as Dr Crone says, this procedure may, if it takes,
be of mighty use to man's health for the amending

(04:51):
of bad blood by borrowing from a better body. As
a quick note, the word pretty could also mean clever, interesting,
or skillful in the sixteen hundreds, so Peeps was likely
saying that the success of the procedure led people to
imagine other clever uses for it, such as in human medicine. Also,

(05:15):
if you're wondering the dog who received the transfusion, the
spaniel was brought before the Royal Society again one week
later and seemed to have recovered nicely. As for those
pretty wishes to transfuse blood into a human, that was
achieved less than a year later in the summer of
sixteen sixty seven. There's some dispute whether the procedure was

(05:39):
performed by Englishman Richard Lower or French physician Jean Baptiste Denny,
but whoever was responsible, we know the patient was a
fifteen year old boy who had been bled so much
by his own doctor that he now required an infusion
of new blood to stay alive. However, the boy was

(06:00):
given blood from a human donor. Instead, he received the
blood of a sheep. Amazingly, the boy survived, despite the
danger of inner species transfusion and the incompatibility of blood types.
It's believed he lived because only a relatively small amount
of sheep's blood had been used. Subsequent patients who received

(06:23):
sheep's blood transfusions weren't so lucky, leading to the practice
eventually being banned from there. Blood transfusions remained a dubious
prospect for at least another couple hundred years. The first
successful human to human transfusion was performed in eighteen eighteen
by British obstetrician James Blundel, but it wasn't until about

(06:48):
a century later in the early twentieth century, that blood
transfusions became reliably safe and beneficial, thanks to the discovery
of distinct blood types. It's tempting to laugh at the
ignorance of seventeenth century medicine, or at least it would
be if those experiments hadn't been so inhumane and dodgy.

(07:10):
But it's worth remembering that information takes time to gather,
and the new discoveries depend on previous attempts, even ones
that seemed distasteful or absurd in hindsight, unsettling as they were,
experiments like the one observed in Samuel Peeps's diary paved
the way for modern medicine and thankfully for modern medical

(07:33):
ethics as well. I'm Gabe Lousier and hopefully you now
know a little more about history today than you did yesterday.
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and if you have any comments or feedback to share,

(07:55):
you can send it my way at this Day at
i heart media dot com. Thanks to Chandler Mays for
producing the show, and thank you for listening. I'll see
you back here again tomorrow for another Day in History class.

(08:15):
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