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Listen to BuzzFeed Daily. I mean, I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to stuff you missed in History Class, A production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast, I'm Holly Fry, and I'm Tracy Wilson. So this is a two parter that I have had on my list for a while.

I scribble down in a notebook as Jean-Baptiste Dinni Dasch blood. This is also one that if you are a regular listener to our show, we actually interviewed a woman we didn't. The previous host, Sarah Anderlini did named Holly Tucker, who wrote a book called Blood Work about this topic, which I used a lot for this one. But there's so much more in terms of the narrative of the story than they were able to get into that it really merits its own discussion, because as I started researching Jean-Baptiste Danny's life, which was well before I actually started doing this episode, it became so immediately apparent that he was embroiled in a lot of conflict professionally.

And the controversial nature of his work was so vehemently opposed that it really halted the development of medical science in some key areas. It's also one of those stories that gets told and retold because there are some very.

Intriguing and titillating facts around it, and in those retellings, things get a little blurry sometimes and some misinformation gets included. So I thought it was worth really like doing kind of a deeper dive on him. And Denise story also happens smack dab in the middle of a time when Europe was absolutely obsessed with science and very competitively obsessed with science. The work that was being done in England and France as scientists were racing to understand what blood really was and how it functioned, was very much an intellectual battle between the two nations.

The reigns of Charles, the second of England and King Louis, the 14th of France were very explosive in terms of cultural and scientific development, with each country jockeying to claim supremacy in various disciplines. And the story of blood transfusions is very much part of that. It also is, you know, a contrast between the two countries in terms of their culture and ideology, because, you know, there's the Protestantism of England and the Catholicism of France in one being very much attached to a kind of old traditional ways of handling things like medicine and the other being England, being a lot more willing to kind of take chances and explore things that hadn't hadn't been established as norms yet.

But even within France, there was a lot of argument going on among men of science about whether transfusions should be attempted at all.

And so we are going to start today by talking about some of the scientific work that led up to these contentious battles over transfusion. This first part is going to cover then Jean Baptiste, Denise, early life and career. And then in the second part, we are going to get to the events that ultimately led to two court cases in Paris regarding Denise work heads up. This first part in particular mentions the use of animals in medicine. I feel slightly guilty because whenever Tracey does a subject where there is animal testing or animal use involved, she's so careful to make it palatable.

So I won't cry. And then I always come in with something like the rabbit test and also blood transfusions with all the dogs. There are reasons that I actually think it's important to talk about this. We're going to keep the details in terms of like the literal medical, you know, kind of gross aspects of it, as minimal as possible. But there's no way to not talk about the animals because they're a big part of these medical developments. And it also opens up a door where we can talk along the way about the various perceptions and reasonings over the ethics of using animal subjects, because even in the 17th century, people were divided over this issue and the medical community was having a lot of debate over it.

So that is how we are approaching Jean-Baptiste Dinni and the development of blood transfusion science.

And I will say we also have similar conversations about subjects besides animals and like how much detail to include without it being like horrifying or traumatizing to people.

The folks are like. How come I only hear this morning with animals like it's not it's not a conversation that's limited to animals an hour? No, not at all. It's one of those things I think we both try to juggle all the time.

Right. Not falling into the sensationalism of relaying information, but still getting the important the important aspects of it conveyed that allows us to touch on the nuances of any given subject. It's a little bit tricky across all kinds of spaces in history. Correct. So to get into the blood conversation in 16, 16, William Harvey published his observations about blood circulation. And he kept working in this area and he turned this into a whole book that was published in 16, 28, eight.

This book was called Exos The Tassimo and Atomic Dinmore to Courtice at Sanguinis and Animal Abuse that was published in sixteen twenty eight.

And these discoveries of Harvey really kicked off a period where scientists were incredibly eager to unlock all the secrets of blood in its workings and often because of how little was really understood. This did lead to experiments that are incredibly cruel by today's standards, including things like injecting animals with all manner of substances to record the reactions and the way people thought about animal testing at the time and also just about animals was far different from the way most of us think about animals.

Today, philosopher and scientist Rene Descartes, who lived until 16 50, had made the case with great vigor that while animals were mechanically similar to humans in terms of having basic functioning systems of organs and muscles, they were not thinking, feeling creatures. That was not how everybody felt. There were definitely people who believed otherwise. But Descartes ideas enabled this mindset that became common enough in the science community that animal experiments were likewise becoming quite common. But the idea of the physical body being connected to the soul was also something that was hotly debated.

And intellectuals tried to both untangle and reconcile the worlds of science, religion and philosophy as they worked this out. In sixteen fifty eight, there was a significant breakthrough in knowledge about blood, and it's working. When Dutch naturalist and microscopist Yon's Vadum looked at blood under a microscope, his description of what he observed as the first recorded known documentation of red blood cells.

Eventually, people got this idea of transferring blood from one being to another, and the British Royal Society was the first to successfully complete an animal to animal transfusion. They did this, of course, using dogs. In 16 65, Englishman Richard Lower had begun experimenting with transfusions in dogs, and he was able to refine his technique to a point where he was consistently successful in transferring blood from one dog to another. A number of different experiments by lower and others followed, and they were done to determine, for example, if the breed size or ages of the dogs involved had any impact on the success of the procedure.

Parisian scientists were aware of these efforts, and one in particular was a mix of fascinated and also frustrated when the findings of these experiments were published in Paris. That person was Jean-Baptiste Sidney.

And just in case anyone wants to look him up, his last name you will find spelled two different ways. Dinni DENR, I guess, and also denied NYS and the beginning of Jean-Baptiste Denise. Life is not really documented at all. His year of birth is placed kind of by estimate, only landing him as having been born in the mid 30s. His father was a craftsman. He made water pumps. Those were increasingly popular at the time, not just for their obvious utility uses in homes, but also as luxury items for the wealthy to ensure that they always had lush gardens.

Denise interest in medicine started when he was a boy and his patient was himself. He had asthma as a kid, which his doctors were not able to control according to his own account. The treatment that had finally worked was one that he devised himself, which was inhaling sulfur, picturing a nine year old doing self experimentation.

And it's a little unsettling. Danny went on to medical school. He received his medical degree from the University of Montpellier, and then he settled in Paris to begin his career. And he was really, really ambitious.

Although he had come from a working class home, he wanted to make a name for himself as a doctor and treat the highest echelons of Parisian society. But having earned his degree outside of Paris, made him an outsider, both physically and also in terms of how he was perceived. Montpelier did not have the reputation of Parisian schools, this was in part because its students were viewed as more interested in carousing than learning and also because the faculty and curriculum there were known to break tradition and to be more willing to explore new concepts in science.

That would have been practically heretical in Paris at the medical schools there. By the time the work being done in England was published in Paris and the periodical philosophical transactions, he was really eager to learn about it. But he did not have the money to get a copy. He was making ends meet for himself and his new wife by teaching anatomy to medical students and dissecting bodies in his own home while students looked on. He could not read English anyway, so if he had been able to get his hands on a copy of this, he would not have been able to read it.

He was so frustrated by this whole thing because he even wrote to the editor of Philosophical Transactions and was like, if I will pay to have translations done. He couldn't afford to do that. I don't know what he thought he was doing, but he was just incredibly frustrated that he couldn't immediately have access to this information. But eventually it took a couple of months. But a translation was published in the journal Malda Seven, and Dinni eagerly read it. He wanted to try transfusion himself and he took advantage of his work again, teaching anatomy to med students to start a review of the circulatory system for himself as he was also teaching his students.

And in this, he was also assisted by a surgeon named Paul MRK and Denise. Obsession with circulation is said to have been mocked by some of his Parisian students during these lessons.

Denise first experiment with dogs was really ambitious. He wanted to keep both animals alive and this was something that the English experiments had never done. He also bled a third dog that was not part of the transfusion as sort of a control. All three dogs survived the procedure, and Danny kept them in his home for a week afterward to track their health and behavior, all of them regained their strength and vigor. And since we are currently on a positive note with everyone surviving the trials, this is a good time to pause for a quick break.

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Listen to BuzzFeed Daily on the radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We mentioned right before the break that the first transfusion, the Danny tried using dogs, worked both of the animals that were actually involved in the transfusion survived, as well as the one that he bled as a control.

But this is where it becomes very, very apparent that Jean-Baptiste, he was not a man who needed multiple successes under his belt before moving to the next stage of experimentation. To him, that first surgery was enough to confirm that transfusion worked and that he could keep both subjects alive. So he was ready to move on to the next step. That next step was a three dog transfusion where one dog was used as the donor dog to the point of being near death.

And then the third dog's blood was used to revive the donor dog. He used the same three dogs from the previous experiment, and it worked despite some confusion during initial recovery, when it was revealed that one of the spectators had given one of the dogs wine from their cup shortly after it had been let out from the operating table. It appeared that Denise had once again achieved his goal and said this really embolden him to prepare for a public experiment.

Yeah, this is one of those things where it's like, oh, I don't know what's wrong with that dog. It's not walking quite right and it's not recovering at the same rate as the others. And then he found out someone had given it wine and it was like, oh, that dog is intoxicated.

OK, I can't think of a more French faux pas than giving a dog wine.

But there you are, the goal of Denise. Third, public transfusion was to see if he could reinvigorate an elderly sickly dog with the blood of a young, healthy one. And he decided to perform this procedure outdoors on the banks of the Sene near the pontiff bridge. There are all kinds of problems with doing surgery outdoors, but we're not getting into that.

He first gave a brief lecture on blood and its properties, and then he began the transfusion.

There were a lot of people gathered around people from, you know, the very upper echelons of society, right down to, you know, people that lived on the street. Success once again, both the old and the young dog survived. And at least by his records, the elderly dog seemed to have gained a level of vigor. And this public exhibition gave Jean-Baptiste Dinni, who had so longed for prestige among the doctors of Paris, an instant reputation as France's transfusion expert.

The experiments continued from there, and he tried all manner of combinations of dogs and in different circumstances.

And then he tried transfusing blood from a calf into a dog, which survived. He repeated this and other experiments, pairing different animals and recording the results and writing up his findings for the journal This Level and corresponding with other publications as well. He had become famous and he was not shy about discussing his successes as he worked this through the spring of sixteen sixty seven.

This all just sounds a little like kind of a mad scientist situation, but other people were also chasing the same information. All of Europe was really trying to unlock the secrets of blood. They were all competing to push the transfusion field farther than the people who came before.

Yes, well, there were also everywhere detractors. It was a very divisive subject for the medical community, which we will talk about some more.

And particularly once that first publication came out of England and was dispersed throughout Europe, people really, really got excited about it.

And as experiments progressed, the big goal, of course, loomed large and that was transfusions involving humans. This opened up discussions of just what species the donor should be. And while some members of the scientific community argued that, of course, only the blood of a human should be used for transfusions into a human subject, these were ideological reasons. They weren't necessarily based in science. Denine did not share that ideology.

Jean-Baptiste Dinni thought the idea of taking blood from one person to add to the life of another was just a horrifying thought. He believed that animal blood was inherently more pure and thus was a better option. This idea of their purity was developed by comparing the behaviours of animals to those of humans to argued that animals were not tainted by emotion, which he thought would corrupt the blood. Animals also did not drink or carouse to him. They lived inherently a cleaner life because they were not driven by their passions to make unhealthy choices.

This is the first time I had encountered that particular line of thought, and it was a very different approach to thinking about and a. In these situations than I had ever come across before, which just fascinated me, so the opportunity to test Danny's idea of transfusing animal blood into a human presented itself. In the summer of 16, 67, there was a teenage boy involved. He is sometimes reported as 16, also sometimes as 15. He had been running a high fever for about two months and doctors had bled him with no improvement.

And finally, Danny was called in, although it's unclear how he learned about the patient, whether he was called by the parents or just alerted to it by maybe someone else in the medical community. We don't know what the boy's parents feelings were on the matter of having an experimental transfusionist suddenly visit their home. But however, the matter was ultimately settled. It was determined that Danny could treat the boy. He used blood from a lamb as the donor.

And initially this boy experienced a mild hemolytic reaction. His arm turned very warm, but this was fleeting and the boy soon relaxed. And then when the patient woke up the next day, he appeared to be cured of this mystery ailment that had puzzled doctors.

For months, Danny reported that he was so pleased with the result and so eager to try it a second time that he then paid a healthy adult a butcher to be his subject. This may or may not have been the same butcher that had assisted with the lamb that was used for the boy's treatment. And once again, things went really smoothly. The butcher reported that he felt fine. He prepared that donor lamb for cooking and left with it. And Danny reported, though, that he found the man just a few hours later drunk in a tavern.

This made the doctor furious, but it also indicated that his experiment had no ill effects.

Danny wrote up his notes and the results of both of these experiments, and he sent the work immediately to the printer for wide distribution, claiming to be the first man to perform blood transfusion on a human patient. This news, of course, made its way to England and infuriated the scientific establishment that had been outpaced by this Frenchman who had learned the basics from their early work. Danny did not ever mention that he had been building on the work of English scientists, which made matters worse.

He actually claimed the whole idea of transfusion had been French from the very beginning. He was crediting a Benedictine monk named Dom Robard disobey with the origin of this whole idea.

Yeah, the idea of crediting your predecessors is already pretty well established in the scientific community. So the fact that he left out all of the English scientists and doctors who had been working on this as well is then kind of rewriting their history. Made people furious, and as a result, the English periodical Philosophical Transactions started running commentaries on the work that Disney was doing. In one, there were passages clarifying that the English, not the French, had conceived of the idea, including this one quote It is notorious that transfusion had its birth.

First of all, in England, some ingenious Person of the Royal Society having first started it there several years ago. Subsequent issues of the periodical pointed out that Disney was moving ahead far too quickly with human experiments and was not prioritizing the health of the patients, but rather the progress of his work and ego. Much was made of the care and caution of English doctors being the reason that Disney had lapped them rather than any sort of scientific leg. It was basically like, no, we're actual scientists in this person is just an egotistical, overenthusiastic nutter who wants to, like, gain fame.

Meanwhile, England's Royal Society was furiously trying to catch up and started animal to human transfusions of their own. Their initial patient was a man with a drinking problem and a very tenuous mental state. After two successful transfusions, the subjects sort of telling people that he had turned into a sheep that obviously caused a whole raft of other problems.

Yeah, well, while those transfusions appeared to be successful, he kind of taint that success by walking around London and saying, I think I'm becoming a sheep. We'll talk a little bit more about that fear coming up. So back in France, those initial positive results of Danny's work with animal to human transfusion gave him the confidence to try the controversial technique again. France was still grappling with the morality of this whole thing. So Danny had to plan with his associates in private what the next step would be.

And that was in part because it involved kidnapping. We will get into the details of how this plan came together after we first pause for a word from our sponsors. The next patient and we have to use air quotes there that Danny turned his attention to was a man named Antoine Millewa. Muoi was a Parisian who had at one point been employed as the valet of the Marquis de 17. But at some point he had developed some sort of mental illness.

This is said to have been catalyzed by a failed romance with a woman, a much higher social standing the more, while not only heartbroken but also mocked for daring to try to climb the social ladder through romance, really created a strain on him mentally. And that strain caused a rapid decline in his mental health. He went from initially exhibiting problems that manifested as irrational, angry outbursts to outright violence over a pretty short period of time, including setting people's homes on fires.

And while the Maquis had gotten him medical attention initially, it did not help.

And so she eventually cut him off from both her aid and his job completely by 16 67, when his part in Dani's story takes place. He's often described as having been homeless, although that is not really accurate. He did have a home. It was outside of Paris, but he was often staying in the city and sleeping on the street. Marwa was infamous in the city for his deranged behavior, and Danny thought that a transfusion might cure him.

Paris, in the winter of 16 67 was just exceptionally cold and the challenges to just survive were insurmountable. For the city's poorest residents, Maurois had managed to persist despite the elements and the odds being against him. But he really was not in great health physically at this point.

Danny had plotted with his surgeon, who was still working with him, as well as other supporters, to use Mahwah.

There was, of course, no consent involved. Melua was a fixture in the Murray district, so men were sent there to look for him and capture him if and when he was found. In short, they were instructed to kidnap him, which they did. He was then taken to a hostel where his room and board were paid until he was needed for the procedure, in part so that he could have a period of regular meals and a warm place to stay in the hopes of bolstering his physical health before they tried this transfusion.

This second animal to human transfusion was performed at a private residence belonging to Orie Louis Damanhour, who was a member of the King's Council and was born into wealth, was a wealth that had been augmented by his father's embezzlement.

While overseeing King Henry, the Forth War Treasury, Moomaw was highly interested in science, and he had seen Danny perform his public transfusion and he was essentially using Danny to bolster his own scientific academy.

That was a project that he had had in the works for some time, and it was all but obliterated by the establishment of the French Academy of Sciences by King Louis the 14th in 1966, scientists of the French Academy had attempted to replicate transfusions that had been done in England, but they were unsuccessful.

So for more more, Denise seemed like the key to outdoing them and reasserting his place as leader in the scientific community of Paris. Since the public experiment by Paul Neuf, which Memoires had witnessed, he had been serving as Denise Patron and ensuring that he had everything that he needed for these experiments.

He had similarly, his academy he had been working on similarly had patronized other scientists and made sure that they had lab space at his compound. They had all of the tools they needed.

They didn't have to worry about, you know, room and board. So he was this patron of scientists, but it was all falling apart for him. And the night that Disney was to make his second transfusion attempt of this nature, Mummer had assembled a number of likeminded dignitaries, medical professionals and curious members of the Parisian elite. He undoubtedly wanted people to know not only that Disney was able to do this, but that he was the one bankrolling it.

There was a butcher on hand to see to the drawing of blood from a calf that had also been brought to the mama home. And there was also that same surgeon, Paul Emiri, who had been consulting with Dinny and who had prepared the room for the transfusion with the various medical tools that they were going to need.

When Marwah was brought into the room, it was, of course, against his will. He was barefoot, he was dressed in rags, and he tried to resist, but was overpowered and tied up by the men that more and Dinny had assembled to help with this whole experiment.

By all accounts, this was a rather frenzied procedure. The spectators on hand kept crowding around Donny and Marie, so both men began cursing and shouting at them, basically saying you have to get back. Ten ounces of blood were first drawn from Iowa and then the transfusions.

Started, but it wasn't entirely successful, even on just a mechanical level, Emery and Dinni were only able to get about five to six ounces of calves blood into Marwah Knee noted that Barwise temperature rose really sharply.

He started to sweat. And this means that he has the distinction of probably having written the first known record of a hemolytic transfusion reaction. That's a transfusion reaction where the blood recipient's immune system rejects and destroys the red blood cells of the donor blood. This experiment, of course, was well before we had any understanding of blood groups which wouldn't really get going until the beginning of the 20th century. And even so, that involved human blood and not calf's blood.

So he and Malfi did not really understand the cause of the reaction that Maurois was having.

And because of the severity of the reaction when really just a tiny amount of the calf's blood had been introduced to stopped the procedure immediately. Maurois was then taken to a room in the memorium servant quarters to rest and the spectacle was over. And after lingering for a bit to murmur over what they had just witnessed, Myanmar's guests at last went home.

And that's where we were going to pause this story.

It's kind of a cliffhanger, might seem a little cruel, but we wanted to keep the events that happened next on all of the ensuing court cases altogether is one part of the story.

Oh, so much so much blood all through this. There's this like, constant recurring, like voice in my head going yell, this is not a good idea, not a good idea. And then we get to this last one. I'm like, yes, seriously. Not a good idea.

Not a good idea. And just morally gross. There's a lot of moral grossness in this story.

Yeah, but I have a story that is not really related to this, but does involve some medical fun. True fun. It is actually about our poinsettia episode.

It is from our listener, Rosily, who writes Hello, Tracey and Holly. First of all, I'm from Oklahoma with a parent from Arkansas. So I say poinsettia. Many people do.

We have had people I know on Twitter, even at my personal account, many people have noted that's how they say it. So there you go.

She continues. I wanted to send a quick note about poinsettia leaves. My mother also loves poinsettias. When I was a wee little chunky toddler in the late eighties, my mom found me surrounded by poinsettia leaves and happily munching on something, being the wonderful nurse that she is. And up to date on all the research, she whisked me to the hospital, afraid I had poisoned myself. After pumping my tummy, a search of my stomach contents showed it was just a banana.

So no harm, no foul. And I have a great story for to trusted a lie type intro's. I cannot imagine how hard it must have been at the time, but it is good to know now that I was in no real danger and we laugh about it is a funny story. Now, I also wanted to say how much I appreciate your thoughtfulness in telling Jim Thorpe story. Indigenous history is so little thought of or discussed in a way that touches all of the complexities.

And I appreciate that you were willing to do that. Thank you for the lovely podcast and work. Keep it up. Rosily, this is so cute. I love that it was a harmless situation.

Yeah, I think I disclosed in our poison control episode that my mother had to call poison control on me multiple times in my childhood.

So I feel kind of a kinship here. I never had to go to the hospital and get my stomach pumped, but I definitely did eat some things that I really should not have eaten.

You know, kids are unwise and they don't know. And they learn about the world through testing it, sometimes by eating it.

Yes. And eating a banana is fine.

Banana is fine unless you're allergic, which I hope not many people are because bananas are lovely.

But if you would like to write to us whether it is about some medical mishap or not, you can do so at History podcast that I heart radio dotcom. You can also find us on social media as missed in history.

And you can subscribe to the show on the I Heart radio app and Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

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