Blood Work (18 page)

While we have few details about how Mauroy eventually came under Denis' care, we do know it happened shortly after the transfusionist, his faithful surgeon, Emmerez, and Montmor met formally to discuss next steps for Denis' transfusion experiments. Sometime in late November 1667 the men schemed to pluck Mauroy from the streets—by force, if necessary—and pre
pare him for his cure. Under the guise of taking pity on him, Montmor instructed members of his guard to find the madman and bring him to his estate.

Though Mauroy was well known in the Marais district, it had not been easy to track him down. The narrow city streets teemed with life and the stench that went with it. The streets collected the city's trash. They also collected its rejects: the penniless, the sick, and the mentally ill. Antoine was only one man in the capital city's sea of unfortunate souls.

Mauroy's insanity had been born of deep disappointment, the kind from which few gentle souls recover: He had formerly been a valet to the illustrious Marquise de Sévigné, among the most elite of the who's-who of literary Paris and a regular presence in the young King Louis XIV's court. Her comments, even in passing, could catapult an author into the stratosphere of high society or condemn him to anonymity. The once-affable Mauroy enjoyed a bird's-eye view of the lovely ladies who frequented Sévigné's salon. A man of humble origins, he should have restricted his pleasures to the earthier young women in the bustling kitchens or to those who carried the washing down to the river every day. But somewhere behind the pleasant smiles he shared with the more beautiful visitors, the then-twenty-four-year-old valet hoped to be able to romance his way into a considerable fortune. Yet he misjudged the strict rules of social mobility—or rather, social immobility—that dominated France in the late seventeenth century. Mauroy's failed romance was a heartbreaking reminder of his low standing; his beloved, whose name is lost to history, married a man of more suitable birth. To his dismay he would never be anything more than a lovelorn valet, the laughingstock of the Marais.

His frenzy came on quickly and brutally. Tearing his tailored uniform into pieces, the wretched Mauroy ran naked and screaming into the streets, threatening and swearing at passersby.
Madame de Sévigné herself called in doctors to cure the man. Barber-surgeons performed numerous bleedings to empty the noxious humors in the blood that had unsettled his mind. He was given cooling compresses and calming foods. Nothing seemed to work. Mauroy's behavior turned violent. He began setting fire to homes and threatening to kill the noblemen whom he blamed for his downfall. Sévigné had no choice but to ban Mauroy from her home for good.

Such exile proved too much for the fragile Mauroy to bear. Not long after, he was found in front of the gallows of the old Marais temple with a cord around his neck, howling that he would hang himself. A neighborhood nuisance, Mauroy inspired compassion in the upper classes. One lady of the court, Madame Commartin, had taken pity on him and ordered her valets to bring Mauroy to her home. She called in physician after physician, surgeon after surgeon, in the hope of curing the poor man. One physician had prescribed a series of bleedings from the feet, the arms, and even the head: eighteen in all.
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Constant bathing was also ordered. In healthy persons, bathing had long been avoided because it was believed that water could seep into the body and weaken otherwise strong humors. Water was reserved for only faces and hands, while perfumes were rubbed vigorously over the rest of the body both to mask odors and to purify the disease-causing corrupt air with which the person came in contact.
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In cases of madness, however, cold baths were thought to shock the patient into a more suitable mental state and to cool the vapors that were troubling the mind. Forty baths later, it was more than clear that traditional methods to cure Mauroy had failed. It was not long until the man could be seen running, naked once again, through the streets.

As the guards roamed the quarter in search of Mauroy, Mont
mor worked his few remaining connections to secure a temporary place for the former valet in a nearby hospital. Right across the river from the Marais stood the largest hospital in Paris, the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris; it was also the oldest. Literally “God's home in Paris,” the hospital still sits where it did then, just adjacent to Notre Dame. The Hôtel-Dieu housed the swelling ranks of the city's sick, its indigent, and its insane. By boarding Mauroy in a nearby hospital, Montmor would have removed him from the streets—but he would also have condemned him to an overcrowded cell and to the constant drama of disease and death that defined all early European hospitals. Only those select few with ample resources could count on a bed—which was always shared by at least one other patient. But as it was, the hospitals were full, and Montmor's waning influence could not open a place for Mauroy. Instead the nobleman arranged lodging for the mentally disturbed man in a hostel on the nearby rue de Beaubourg, where he was locked in a small room and fattened up until the moment was right for his transfusion. And as Denis prepared for what would be his final transfusion, the transfusionist's most dangerous enemies were plotting his downfall.

I
f transfusion was intended as a cure for insanity, it could also take sane men to the very brink of violent madness. Henri-Martin de la Martinière was one of those men. A self-trained doctor, Martinière was a man of deep faith and great passion; he was also a man of impressive hyperbole and rich imagination. Denis' detractors in the Academy of Science and the Paris Faculty of Medicine considered the transfusionist to be a dangerous renegade. Soon, the same—and more—would be said about the man who would become Denis' greatest foe.

If there was ever a man who would have seemed likely to support Jean-Baptiste Denis, it was Martinière. Born just a year before Denis, in 1634, the thirty-three-year-old Martinière was similarly restless by nature. At the age of nine he had run away from his home in Rouen and soon found a place for himself in a military encampment near Geneva. The boy could usually be found tagging behind the resident barber-surgeon in the camp's makeshift infirmary. There, Martinière learned how to keep patients bandaged and well bled, pull rotting teeth, and when
occasions presented themselves, remove bullets and amputate battle-wracked limbs. His life among the French soldiers came to a sudden halt three years later when, at the age of twelve, he and his regiment were captured by Spanish forces. After much fast talking Martinière negotiated his way onto a ship bound for the East.
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Martinière had been on the Portuguese ship for just two days when the captain spotted a fleet of ships in the distance. In this no-man's-land along the Barbary Coast, corsairs ruled. The captain called his crew to the decks and passed around bottles of hard alcohol. Each man, including the barely teenage Martinière, took a swig. They would fight the pirates off with every ounce of strength they had in them—and to the death. Fifteen minutes later they were surrounded. Martinière's shipmates set off every cannon they had and, within moments, the air was black with soot. One of the corsair ships splintered in two and groaned as it sank to the bottom of the sea. Fearless, the young Martinière crouched behind the balustrade of the ship and deftly added to the gunshots volleyed in every direction. But outnumbered and insufficiently armed, his ship began its slow descent into the blue-gray water.

The pirates brought the healthiest-looking men aboard, planning to make a tidy profit selling the foreigners as slaves. But the corsairs had lost their surgeon, and their captain was looking for a replacement among the captives. The lanky Martinière stepped forward, declaring confidently that he was the surgeon of the captured ship. The pirates bellowed with laughter. The captain growled at the boy and asked if his master, the ship's surgeon, had been killed. Martinière growled back dismissively, “No, because I'm still alive.”
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The captain looked the boy up and down one more time and nodded to one of his men, who tossed the surgeon's tool kit to Martinière.

Martinière's travels afforded him a view of the worst of what humanity had to offer. During a stop in Egypt he had witnessed the dark side of medicine while stocking up on supplies at a local apothecary shop. There, in a back room, he saw piles of desiccated human bodies layered one on top of another. In a corner a man was removing the brains and internal organs of a fresh body. The body was then filled with a black sticky liquid, wrapped in dressings, and left to dry. The “mummies” were destined for export to Europe, where they were prized for their purported curative properties by even the most highly respected physicians. Small bits of dried mummy flesh, ingested either whole or powdered, were believed to cure a wide range of ailments, such as headaches, paralysis, epilepsy, vertigo, earaches, sore throats, scorpion stings, and incontinence.
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Like most Europeans, Martinière had always believed that the mummies had been pulled from ancient sands. Instead the apothecary-turned-body-trafficker admitted that smallpox, leprosy, or plague provided a steadier supply of bodies.
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And when that was not sufficient to meet the gluttonous demands of the West, there were no doubt other, more criminal ways, of finding “volunteers.”

As a young boy Martinière spent his nights paralyzed by fear as he overheard his pirate captors tell stories of grayish red sirens with hair as thick as horse manes and wings on their backs, and of two-headed Hydras whose poisonous bite rotted human flesh.
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Men could be just as terrifying as monsters, it seemed. And, for the pirate-surgeon, monsters would forever lurk around every dark corner.

At the age of sixteen Martinière was rescued from the corsairs by Maltese soldiers. He continued his nomadic life much as he had before, connecting with others who could provide food, lodging, and protection. From Malta he traveled to Rome and offered his services at a hospital there. From Rome he made his
way slowly back to Rouen, where he attended medical school and became officially what he had already been for years: a physician. Records of his life in Rouen and in the years preceding his involvement in blood transfusion controversies are scant. However, there is little doubt that Martinière's ability to work his connections in whatever community he happened to find himself certainly proved useful.

Barely five years after earning his medical degree, Martinière had negotiated an appointment as a physician in the court of Louis XIV, which offered him the same status and privileges as others who had trained in the much more elite—and certainly more conventional—medical faculty at the University of Paris. Yet, like Denis, Martinière floated on the periphery of the Paris scientific elite. While his talent for insinuating himself into any situation had come in handy, it had also come up short. He had been given a rare exception to be able to practice medicine in the capital, but without a diploma from the University of Paris, he would never teach there. And as much as he may have wished to count himself a full member of the Paris medical corps, the opportunity to interact with those in its inner sanctum would present itself only too infrequently. Still Martinière, now a credentialed and practicing Paris physician, would never be able to shake the education he had received among the pirates. He was always looking over his shoulder for potential danger—and blood transfusion loomed large as one of the greatest threats to mankind he had ever seen.

Martinière knew there could be no proposal more macabre than blood transfusion. He worried about where physicians planned to get their blood sources, if they should ever decide to transfuse humans to humans. Would physicians—like the Egyptian apothecaries who trafficked “mummies”—become little more than “buyers and sellers of human blood,” as they brokered
deals for rich men who wished to buy the blood of beggars? Martinière shuddered as he imagined in graphic detail a host of violent scenarios. Children would be whipped so that their blood vessels would warm and fill with as much blood as possible—then they would be offered to men desperate to cure horrific illnesses such as plague and syphilis.
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Blood transfusion, he believed, was just a first step to the worst imaginable crimes against humanity—and certain damnation. “Men will cut one another's throat to preserve their life,” wrote Martinière.
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Soon, there would be nothing keeping people from “bathing several times over” in the blood of innocent victims. Or worse: cannibalism. “Whoever is unscrupulous enough to fill their veins with the blood of another,” he declared with an almost palpable shudder, “will find little trouble in eating human flesh to heal himself.”
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On a chilly fall night in 1667 Martinière had a dream about transfusion that would set him on a divine mission to right the wrongs men like Denis seemed bent on committing. As he would later claim in his many spirited and rambling writings against transfusion, a beautiful woman with bright eyes came to him while he slept fitfully that night and stood in front of his bed. She whispered to him reassuringly, and delicately rinsed his face and eyes with clear, clean water. From the corner of his eye Martinière also saw a young man step toward him holding a lyre in one hand and an archery bow in the other. “Who are you?” gasped Martinière. “I am Apollo,” the young man replied. “Son of Jupiter and father of the great physician Asclepius. The goddess Truth has washed your eyes so that you can see what I want to show you. Engrave this into your mind so that you can spread the message to the rest of the human race.”
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At Apollo's command the goddess whipped back the bed-curtains. Martinière gasped in horror. His bed now dangled from
a steep precipice. A hideous smell of death emanated from the deep pit below. Leaning from his bed, he squinted as he struggled to make out the scene. A group of natural philosophers were concocting experiments. Their purpose: to ensure their fame and to get closer to finding the secret of immortality. In one of these experiments a natural philosopher grabbed a helpless animal and deftly sliced its tail off. Taking a syringe, he injected the animal's tail with so much milk that white liquid began to spurt from its eyes, nose, and ears.

The philosopher turned to his colleagues and declared proudly, “You are witness to this new miracle that I have invented. Those who can no longer eat can now introduce food into their veins.” The others in the group nodded approvingly. Then, like ravenous beasts, the philosophers each grabbed pairs of animals and began a frenzied rush of transfusions. Lion's blood flowed into lamb veins; lamb's blood into wolf veins. Martinière's dream replayed the history of early blood experiments—from Wren's infusions of milk, beer, and blood to Lower's hopes of intravenous feeding. But it was the final act, evoking as it did Boyle's hopes for interspecies transmutations, that brought the greatest of horrors. Without warning the macabre school of philosophers turned their bloody lancets on one of their own. Their human victim was bled dry, and his veins filled with cow's blood. Martinière watched as the philosopher transformed, slowly but surely, into a large cow. The philosophers bemoaned in horror the plight of their colleague, as they worked desperately to undo the spell that their transfusion had cast on him. Then the curtains closed; the room went dark.
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As the sleeping Martinière battled monsters created by these philosopher-transfusionists, his footman gently opened the chamber door. He held in his hands copies of three letters: Denis' letter to Montmor, which announced his successful transfusions;
a second letter by the influential Paris doctor Guillaume Lamy to the venerable physician René Moreau, which denounced the procedure vehemently; and a third by a Monsieur Gadroys, which took exception to Lamy's criticisms and defended Denis.
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The letters had been sent by an unnamed colleague who was asking for Martinière's opinion on the matter.

Martinière's nightmare soon became reality as his eyes scanned the pages. In the first letter Jean-Baptiste Denis crowed about his successes transfusing dogs to dogs, then animals of different species, and finally the young boy and the butcher. It was a copy of the same letter Oldenburg had received, and it provoked in Martinière similar outrage. His concerns about interspecies blood transfusions were confirmed, and heightened, as he read the second letter.

Guillaume Lamy, a well-respected and influential member of the Paris medical faculty, left no room for debate when it came to his thoughts on blood transfusion. The procedure, he wrote, was more than just “a new way to torment sick people.”
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To transfuse animal blood into human veins, he argued, would have “very grave effects.” The flesh and blood of every creature, humans included, contained different “particles” that produced the different qualities and characteristics that could then be used to define the creature's distinction from the rest. The blood of some animals contained particles useful to grow horns, so they grew horns. Cows had particles in their blood that made them stupid, Lamy explained, so they were stupid.
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Both in the letter and throughout his writings over the course of his career, Lamy dismissed the idea of finalism, which held that both animals and humans were formed as they were and behaved as they did because of some divine unalienable plan. If man turned out the way he did, it was because God had offered a menu of qualities and characteristics possible in all of his crea
tures, but it was only—literally, for Lamy—by the luck of the draw during reproduction that humans turned out as they did. “As three dice,” Lamy explained, “thrown on a table form of necessity some of the numbers that are between three and eighteen, without possibly forming either more or less, so in the same way the particles of the seed [
semence
] ineluctably make some man, without being able to produce a body of another species.”
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It was only once the qualities of a given species had been set that the creature found a way to make use of them. As Lamy emphasized, eyes were not made for seeing; rather, beings see because they have eyes.
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Lamy's opposition to blood transfusion sprang from the fact that it mixed particles that would now fully “belong” to separate species following this complicated game of luck. He warned in his letter that mixing the blood of a cow and a human would lead to “pernicious effects.” It risked infusing humans with particles that would give them, like cows, “heavy and slow minds.” A bitter critic of Descartes and his theories of mind-body dualism, Lamy also feared deeply that the human soul was also at risk. Lamy was a materialist who believed, much like Thomas Willis, that the soul resided—in both animals and humans—firmly in the body itself. Mixing the blood of species meant not just transferring physical appearance and behaviorial inclinations from donor to recipient, it also risked transferring the very qualities of the soul from one to the other.