Blood Work (7 page)

FIGURE 9:
Late-seventeenth-and early-eighteenth-century illustrations—and the machines that were built using the drawings—demonstrated the mechanical processes underlying an animal's movement. Here, the swan's paddling through water is shown in terms of cogs and wheels. “Diverses machines inventées par M. Maillard. Cygne artificiel” (1733).

The seventeenth century ushered in an age of machines—and circulation stood as a prime exemplar of mechanistic understand
ing. When William Harvey plotted the circular path of blood, he was also describing an elaborate human machine composed of pumps, valves, and tubes. And it was through circulation—both as a metaphor and a scalable model—that Wren had expressed his radical new vision for the city of London following the Great Fire. For Wren a new layout for the city would not only cure London's ills: The plan was the ultimate physical representation of a mechanistic human body and a celebration of the circulation models that the architect had spent so much time exploring in his early career at Oxford. The city would function like a well-oiled machine, moving people and goods as smoothly as the heart pumped blood through the body.

Wren's plan was bold, calling for a complete raze and rebuild of London. It rejected the tight network of serpentine medieval streets as plague-breeding firetraps. Instead wide thoroughfares would cut geometric angles through the city, and open piazzas would ensure a constant ebb and flow of the city's crush of cart and carriage traffic. The design called for a free-flowing city made up of arterylike roads and circular piazzas that echoed the very themes of circulation that had captured the scientific imagination of seventeenth-century England. Two wide avenues emanated from the east. Serving as major arteries, one thoroughfare flowed from the Royal Exchange, the other from the Tower of London. The two would come together at Wren's rebuilt Saint Paul's Cathedral, which would serve as the heart of the city. United at the cathedral, the avenues would continue across a now-cleaned-up Fleet river until they came to a “head” at an enormous circular piazza. London, in Wren's plans, “would be like a human body in which the unhindered circulation of people, money, and goods would nourish and bring to life all corners of the capital.”
³¹

FIGURE 10:
The Statua Humana was constructed from simple objects such as funnels, tubes, and bellows. Image nine illustrates the flexible male member, which is enlarged by pushing on the balloon-like bladder sitting directly above.

Yet postfire construction efforts presented a frustrating reminder that politics were not subject to the rules of anatomy and physiology. While well received, Wren's plan had not been the only design presented. Evelyn offered his own three days later, and then Robert Hooke added still another, which was itself followed by those of city surveyor Peter Mills, cartographer
Richard Newcourt, and army captain Valentine Knight. As the merits of each plan were debated, the determination of property lines and the rightful ownership of plots proved more difficult than anticipated. Many property owners had fled the city and had yet to return to claim their now-destroyed homes. They also faced exorbitant surveying fees, which seemed to increase daily, as demand for surveyors far outstripped supply. And of course many property records had been destroyed in the conflagration, creating a legal mess that would have to work its way through the courts for years to come. In the end Wren's ambitious designs for London were shelved along with those of Evelyn, Hooke, and the others. London would be rebuilt on its old foundations.

FIGURE 11:
With its emphasis on the free flow of Londoners through the city's rebuilt “arteries,” Christopher Wren's plans for postfire London reflected Harvey's circulation studies.

Despite the eventual rejection of his glorious plans for Lon
don, Wren turned his efforts to a project that would take nearly thirty years to complete and one that would be the crowning glory of his architectural legacy: Saint Paul's Cathedral. However, other members of the Royal Society, like the steel-willed Richard Lower and his colleagues Edmund King and Thomas Coxe, returned as soon as they could to the laboratory to begin anew their blood experiments and to push their trials to the logical end point: human transfusions.

S
o it was on the evening of November 14, 1666, that candles and lamps filled the Royal Society's long, narrow meeting room, casting shadows on several dozen well-dressed men as they nudged closer for a better view.
¹
Wooden floors creaked and conversations echoed off the imposing thirteen-foot ceilings. Two eager surgeons, Edmund King and Thomas Coxe, had been given the honor of replicating Lower's groundbreaking experiments. They knew that they had very large shoes to fill, and they moved busily through the room as they prepared the table for their victims.

In the effort to re-create Lower's earlier canine transfusion experiments to the letter, two dogs were brought in: a spaniel and a mastiff, which were lifted up to the experiment table and tightly secured. The room was vibrating with anticipation as eager spectators elbowed their way closer and closer to the table. Soon the din was punctuated with perfectly orchestrated, high-pitched yelps as the surgeons' blades sliced first through the vein of the spaniel and then through the artery of the mastiff. The
floors were slick with blood; the surgeons' clothes were stained red. Like a triumphant bullfighter, one of the surgeons ordered the now-dead mastiff to be carried away from the table, out of the ring. Glad to be released from its bonds, the spaniel jumped spiritedly off the table and ran to the door as fast as it could. In the days and weeks that followed, the spaniel grew—not as big as the mastiff had been—but he still grew and got fat to boot. It had been, as Pepys later described it, a “pretty experiment.”

Towering in the distance during the experiments was the stout Henry Oldenburg. As secretary and publicist for the Royal Society, he was responsible for setting his own inked quills into action and spread the news of yet another English success. If Oldenburg had risen quickly through the ranks of the tight-knit society, it had to do in no small part with his extraordinary linguistic abilities. German by birth, Oldenburg had spent his youth on the Continent and was fluent in English, French, Italian, Latin, Greek, and, of course, English. While the secretary of the Royal Society was exceptionally conversant with the science of the day, he was not a natural philosopher per se. His name had been built around his abilities as a polyglot reporter, and it was likely that his connections with Robert Boyle and other strategically placed correspondents had ensured his membership in the society. Oldenburg was among the first forty men to be nominated to the society and was officially elected to its ranks on December 26, 1660. He was later named as one of two secretaries, along with John Wilkins—a position he would hold until his death in 1677.

Oldenburg clearly took his responsibilities as secretary very seriously. When the society's weekly meetings were discontinued during the plague, he was one of the few members who did not flee to the countryside. Remaining in his home in Pall Mall, he continued his correspondence with colleagues in England and abroad—no easy task, given the substantial disruption of cou
rier services. Oldenburg was so worried about the “books and papers belonging to the Society that are in my custody” that he had made contingency plans for these materials to be put in a box and transferred into safe hands should he feel unwell.
²

Five days following King and Coxe's blood transfusion at the Royal Society, Oldenburg closed his
Philosophical Transactions
with a short, and much understated, article about the experiment:

With satisfaction Oldenburg returned his quill to the inkpot and reached for the lead pounce pot that sat close by on the writing desk. The ink was still wet; a sprinkling of fine pounce powder would help dry it quickly. He collected the manuscript pages, skimmed through them attentively, and then sent them without delay to the printers in what was then Duck Lane in the vicinity of Saint Bartholomew-the-Great.

Duck Lane was a narrow thoroughfare that sat in a northern London neighborhood called Little Britain. Just one street outside of the perimeter of the fire's destruction, Little Britain had quickly become the makeshift headquarters for publishing. The stationers—as publishers were called—had seen their stock and storage go up in flames at Saint Paul's Cathedral. Even the books
and wares they had carried for safety into Saint Faith's Church lay now in ashes, along with the latest issue of the
Philosophical Transactions.
The printers were unsettled and broke; what little printing equipment and paper remained had become extraordinarily precious—and expensive. Oldenburg had to do no small amount of negotiating to ensure that a new issue would be produced.

With October's cinders still smoldering, it was now mid-November and the weather in London was cooling with each passing day. But here in the small space of the noisy and bustling printer's shop, there was no chance of escaping the heat. Metal clanged, printing presses rattled. The cacophony was made still louder by the anxious shouts and name-calling that broke out regularly in the workshop. Publishing took laborious effort and required meticulous attention to detail. One mistake could give a commissioning author reason to ask for reparations or, worse, demand a new print run.

In the corner stood wooden cases filled with letters, punctuation marks, and spaces. A typesetter gathered letters with lightning dexterity as his assistant read aloud each word of Oldenburg's manuscript. Once the typecase was full, the typesetter gestured to an apprentice, who gingerly carried the tray to an enormous table where it waited to join others for its turn at the press. In the center of the room the pressman rolled oil-based black ink evenly across the raised letters with a ball. Sleeves rolled up and sweat dripping from his brow, he expertly squared a large folio of damp rag paper on the cases, reached up for the handle, and lowered the press onto the pages. Bearing down for two or three seconds, he then freed the paper from the press, gently peeled the page from the form, and hung it to allow the ink to set and the paper to dry.

Page after page, hour after hour, the process repeated itself. The pages were folded and sewed together. A few days later
nearly twelve hundred copies of the
Philosophical Transactions
would be on their way to all corners of London, its surrounding countryside, and even farther.
⁴

As they would for months and years to come, scientists and medical men scrambled to arrange for this latest issue of the
Philosophical Transactions
to be sent to them through an informal network of acquaintances. Couriers and “mercuries” pushed one another aside as they clamored for copies of the journal. Mostly women of various reputations, mercuries were resellers who “cried books” from their stalls at the London Exchange. The printers spied each woman as she entered the shop, and they agreed to sell their wares—still reluctantly at that—only to those whom they trusted. A good profit could be lost quickly to mercuries and other hawkers who regularly forged cheap copies of stationers' products.

While most copies of the
Philosophical Transactions
remained in England, a privileged handful would travel across the Channel and wind up in the private libraries of the highest-ranking noblemen. Once the precious goods were firmly in the hands of the noblemen's couriers, they moved east through the still-smoldering city by way of Watling Street, which led directly to Canterbury. From there the couriers made their way through the woods over the narrow and muddy road to Kent, and then forged ahead through the hills to Dover. From the cliffs of England's premier port city to the Continent, it was possible to spot the French town of Calais. The
Philosophical Transactions
would find land again there, where another courier waited to shepherd the precious publication on the final leg of its journey to Paris.

Oldenburg maintained close connections to France. Between 1659 and 1660, before his appointment to the Royal Society, he had spent several months in Paris as the tutor of Robert Boyle's
nephew. Now, as London struggled to rebuild, it was Boyle who encouraged Oldenburg to stay in touch with acquaintances in France to keep an eye on the scientific activities of England's enemies. With the country in the grip of war, the Royal Society secretary forged, in particular, a strategic correspondence with Louis XIV's secretary, Henri Justel, who offered an abundance of political updates as well as juicy gossip about life among the French nobles.
⁵
Oldenburg had learned confidentially from Justel that plans were afoot to form a French Academy of Sciences. “Steps are being taken here,” Justel wrote, “towards the establishment of some academy to be composed of men selected from all sorts of professions. We do not yet know the details of it, for that is only sketched. If the idea is taken to heart, some considerable establishment will result, and there is reason to hope it will succeed. Do not speak of it very definitely until it is further advanced.”
⁶

 

B
y the end of January 1667 rumors of English experiments with blood transfusion were buzzing quietly throughout medical Paris. Oldenburg's short announcement had been supplemented a month later by Lower's complete letter to Boyle in the next issue of the
Philosophical Transactions
. But the few copies of the
Philosophical Transactions
that made it to Paris were held tightly by high-ranking nobles who had either the financial means to buy up the rare copies or could tap their personal connections to Oldenburg to acquire one. For men like Jean-Baptiste Denis who were not part of the moneyed scientific elite, their knowledge of the English experiments was based, then, on little more than hearsay and speculation. Yet even if Denis had been privileged enough to gain a rare peek at Oldenburg's publications, he—like most other men of science of the time—would not have been able to make
heads or tails of it. The French medical community—even those who now had the news of English transfusion in their hands—would still have to wait for translations to be completed.
⁷

The delay riled Denis; he was eager to stay on top of the most-cutting-edge medicine. His characteristic impatience later led the French physician to write directly to the multilingual Oldenburg and beg that French translations of the journal be made available. “I wish I understood English in order to be able to read your Transactions; whenever I can find someone who explains something to me I am even more eager to see the remainder. I have often wished that instead of the copies in English which you send to France you would send just one in French; I would gladly have had it printed at my expense both for your own reputation and the gratification of an infinite number of the inquisitive, who would be delighted to be able to read and understand them by themselves, instead of which there are only three or four who see them.”
⁸
Living on what little income he earned giving anatomy lessons to beginning medical students, however, the ambitious Denis would have been unlikely to make good on his expensive offer. But that was soon to change.

Denis' modest apartment on the Quai des Grands-Augustins overlooked the gray waters of the Seine where it narrowed and wrapped around the Île de la Cité. The largest of Paris's several islands,
⁹
it served as a transition between the city's Left and Right banks. The Left Bank, where Denis lived, was home to the Latin Quarter. This vibrant area of Paris earned its name from Latin, the lingua franca used in the universities and in the bookshops that populated the quarter's streets and alleys. Serious students in their ankle-length black gowns memorized the works of ancient philosophers and studied the effects of cheap wine in their evening revelries. Just steps from Denis' home were streets like the narrow rue de Seine, where French students mingled with Flemish, Dutch, and German students who had come to France seek
ing adventure. And in the grungy boarding houses where they lived, rats, mice, and fleas kept all of them good company and “mistreated” them at night.
¹⁰

Newly married,
¹¹
Denis had only recently begun to settle into his adult Parisian life, living among the students in the Latin Quarter. Just a few months earlier he had been finishing his studies in Montpellier's renowned medical school. The son of an artisan, Denis knew that he would be fighting the odds in his attempts to establish his reputation among Paris physicians and their prominent patients. Yet he remained more confident than ever in his abilities to treat even the most stubborn of illnesses. As a young child he had suffered terribly from asthma. Despite countless remedies, family doctors and apothecaries had been unable to provide relief. But as Denis reports in one of his many treatises, he alone had been able to cure his ailments and been able to keep his asthma at bay through the help of self-prescribed treatments of inhaled sulfur.
¹²
The thirty-two-year-old eagerly looked forward to his next trip to Montpellier, when he would be awarded his doctoral “bonnet.” The cap would signal to the world that he had been accepted fully into the highest ranks of medicine—and that he had transcended his bourgeois origins to enter, as only rare men did, the elite ranks of society.