Paul Craddock
Paul Craddock is a cultural historian, broadcaster and award-winning author based in London. His debut book, Spare Parts: A Surprising History of Transplants (2022), tells the 500-year history of modern transplants, and was a Daily Mail Book of the Week and won the Special Commendation of the Royal Society of Literature Giles St Aubyn Awards. Paul is Honorary Professor in the History of Science & Society at University College London’s Division of Surgery, and a Senior Research Associate at the Science Museum, London.
First animal-human blood transfusion
The first recorded and purportedly successful animal-human blood transfusion (xenotransfusion) was performed by the Paris-based French surgeon Jean-Baptiste Denis (personal physician to King Louis XIV) on 15 June 1667. Called to the house of a 15-year-old boy who'd been sick for two months with a a heavy fever, Denis and his assistant first tried the common technique of "letting blood". When this didn't yield results, they decided to try a blood transfusion from a live animal – a technique they had been exploring for several years – by connecting a tube from a lamb's artery into a vein in the boy's arm. After being put to bed to rest after the procedure, in which approximately 12 ounces (340 g) of blood are noted to have been transferred, when the boy woke, Denis notes he felt "cheerful enough" and is said to have gone on to make a full recovery.
This was a novel medical technique that Denis and some of his peers, as well as several "men of science" in England such as physician Richard Lower, had been working on since the 1640s. Denis thought that humans could assimilate lamb’s blood on the grounds that we eat their meat and drink their milk.
Denis used lamb’s blood because it was also deemed "pure" and "calming" – a belief which would lead him to later transfuse lamb’s blood as a cure for insanity. The treatment appeared to work, but only because not much blood, if any, was actually transfused. The patient’s body would react badly – not badly enough to kill them, but badly enough to make them too tired to exhibit symptoms of their insanity!
This was the start of a series of xenotransfusion experiments overseen by Denis over about a year, which came to be known as the "Transfusion Affair" in France because they triggered a lot of debate and controversy in society. As well as lambs, Denis would also use young cows and goats as part of a total of five xenotransfusion trials in which two people died but three were supposedly cured of their ailments. Parisian lawyer Louis de Basril commented in February 1668: “There was never anything that divided opinion as much as we presently witness with the transfusions. It is a topic of the salons, an amusement at the court, the subject of philosophical dissertations; and doctors talk incessantly about it in all their consultations."