Blood Work (19 page)

Lamy's letter had been strategic. Before being distributed broadly, it had first been delivered in manuscript to René Moreau, a well-known member of the Paris Faculty of Medicine whose loathing for Montpellier doctors was legendary. Nearly thirty-five years earlier the now-elderly Moreau had been one of the chief architects of an intellectual assault against Théophraste Renaudot, an outspoken advocate of Paracelsan chemical medicine. A gradu
ate of the University of Montpellier, Renaudot began practicing in the capital city without the permission of the University of Paris medical faculty. He created a
bureau d'adresse
, a central “address” or agency, where the homeless could request financial, legal, and especially medical help. The need was great, and Renaudot's services were in high demand. His medical center regularly dispensed doses of antimony and other chemical remedies of which the medical faculty disapproved, and as it grew, it threatened to overtake the influence of the Paris Faculty of Medicine on the hearts and minds of the populace. Unwilling to put up with this threat to their dominance, in 1640 the faculty filed charges against Renaudot for practicing medicine without their approval.

In 1641 Moreau had written a spirited
Defense of the Faculty of Medicine of Paris.
In it he argued passionately that Renaudot's many diplomas were not worth the paper they were printed on and conveyed no right to practice in Paris. Moreover he had been a mere child when he received his medical training at the age of nineteen and clearly did not have a firm-enough grasp on medicine to actually practice on living, breathing patients. And finally Moreau reviewed nearly every argument imaginable against antimony, showing that even Renaudot's own colleagues from the South of France were not convinced that it worked.
¹⁶
After several years of legal wrangling Renaudot was forced to abandon his practice and was later officially stripped of all privileges. Not long after, the emboldened Paris Faculty of Medicine issued a formal condemnation of
all
Montpellier doctors practicing in Paris.
¹⁷

The Renaudot trial was a euphoric triumph for Paris physicians—and one that Lamy hoped could be repeated now, in the case of Jean-Baptiste Denis. By sending his letter to Moreau, Lamy signaled to the faculty at the University of Paris that it was now time to go on the offensive against this most recent Montpellier-trained menace.

Martinière was convinced that the timing of the letters, following as it did his horrific dream, was not a simple coincidence: It was a divine call to action. “To allow foreign blood to enter one's veins,” Martinière resolved, “is to bring about a bloodbath, a most inhuman remedy,” one that “will attract the ire of God.”
¹⁸
For Martinière, a physician in the court of Louis XIV, the boundaries between nightmare and reality were overlapping in the most terrifying of ways. He had kept abreast of English questions about transfusion's potential to transmute species. And circulating as he now did among the Paris physicians, he was well aware of the anger that Denis' experiments had caused.

But for Martinière the dangers of transfusion were not simply abstract conjecture. The idea that humans and beasts could be merged in novel ways seemed frighteningly real. As Martinière battled monsters in his dreams, he was also reliving his greatest childhood fears. And if his brutal education on the pirate ship had taught him anything, it was that when one had to choose between fight or flight: Fight.

W
hile Mauroy was sequestered and awaiting the transfusionist's knife, his wife was roaming Paris in search of him. A villager unaccustomed to the bustle of the big city, Perrine wove her way awkwardly through a crush of bodies and carriages. The noise was deafening: Hawkers clanged bells announcing that they had brandy for the men trudging to work, town criers shouted the day's news, quarreling neighbors screeched at the tops of their lungs.
¹

Perrine knew the cold fact behind her husband's violent outbursts. She had come to understand it long ago: He did not love her; he never had. He had longed desperately to marry a noble-woman whose love could never be requited, and Perrine paid daily for his disappointment. His first fit of “extravagance” set him on a rampage that lasted ten months. As he began to come slowly to his senses, Mauroy discovered that his marriage had been arranged to a woman in his village, ten miles from Paris. Mauroy's family had been convinced that married life would provide the stability he needed; they had even been able to persuade
the bride that Mauroy's madness had been due to a temporary illness. Young and trusting, Perrine believed them. But within the first year of his marriage, Mauroy's anger and disappointment again drove him to madness. No longer naive, Perrine realized that she had been duped and was now consigned to a life of regular beatings.

No matter how many doctors or clergymen came to the Mauroys' home to cure him, his outbursts were unremitting. Mauroy was not in a position to support his family, and whatever was left of his wife's dowry had been spent long ago at the apothecary and on doctors' fees. Perrine begged a few fellow villagers to help her restrain her husband in the home they shared. After a mighty struggle Mauroy found himself tied tightly to the bed. Perrine did not do this to protect her husband from himself; she did it for her own safety. In the worst days of his angry fits, she feared for her life. But despite his wife's best efforts, Mauroy found a way to slip out of his restraints in the late fall of 1667. He ran straight to Paris, where he was soon intercepted by Montmor's guards and held alone in a small room for his history-making transfusion.

Mauroy found himself tied up again—this time strapped to a chair in Montmor's large meeting hall—and surrounded by well-dressed strangers. While Montmor watched euphorically, Denis and Emmerez transfused Mauroy with about six ounces of lamb's blood. The second transfusion a few days later proved to be more intense for the patient. He felt the same heat in his arm, his pulse raced, and his face quickly became covered in sweat. The hours immediately following the procedure had also been perilous. Mauroy experienced a bout of debilitating fever, nausea, diarrhea, nosebleeds, and urine that was as black as “chimney soot.” But again, just days after the experiment, his body seemed to recover. And now his sane behavior served as proof of transfusion's benefits.

News spread quickly throughout Paris. The crowded streets of the Marais buzzed with excitement with the news of Denis' “cure.” Given her husband's past, Perrine suspected that he had fled to Paris, where she wandered the streets in search of him. If it is not easy to understand why Mauroy's wife would have searched for him, given how much she feared him, it would also not have been easy to be a woman of little means on her own in late-seventeenth-century Europe. Any husband, even one as uncaring and unbalanced as Mauroy, was perhaps better than no husband at all.

As Perrine heard gossips tell stories about the madman now in Montmor's care, she knew without a doubt that they could only be talking about her husband. So, on Christmas Eve, just four days after the second experiment, the penniless Perrine Mauroy passed through the gates of Montmor's comfortable residence. She marveled at the richly appointed home and soon marveled as well at the dramatic change in her husband, who was now “of a very calm spirit.” Visitors who had known Mauroy during his employment by Madame de Sévigné also flowed into Montmor's home. Each in turned confirmed that the man “was restored to the same state he used to be in before his Phrenzy.”
²

Denis set to work on broadly publicizing his successes. As the holiday season came to a close, the transfusionist sent letters to every corner of Europe. First on his list was Henry Oldenburg. While the secretary of the Royal Society likely continued harboring ill will toward the French transfusionist, the society's successes with Arthur Coga had done much to temper animosities. To Denis' great delight, his letter describing Mauroy's two successful transfusions was published, in full and in translation, in the February 10, 1668, edition of the
Philosophical Transactions.
The French original was printed shortly afterward in the
Journal des sçavans
as well.

No one could have been more delighted than Montmor. His
reward came in the form of correspondence between Denis and Samuel Sorbière, the secretary of Montmor's now-defunct academy. It was Sorbière who, four years earlier, had initiated the move to dismantle Montmor's private gatherings in order to replace them with the king's academy—and Montmor still bristled at the thought. But Sorbière had experienced his own setbacks. Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's prime minister, recognized that Sorbière was nothing more than an opportunist. Having not been invited to join the king's new Academy of Sciences, the dejected Sorbière was now in Italy, grasping at straws in an attempt to woo scientific power brokers there. Transfusion was quickly gaining ground in Rome and Bologna. The ultimate goal for Italian natural philosophers was, as it had been for the French and English, to perform their experiments on humans. But they still had a long way to go. Seeing an opportunity, Sorbière was now begging Denis for details of the activities that had taken place in Montmor's home.
³
Denis obliged, bragging with even more bravado than usual about his successes at the Montmor estate. This delighted Montmor immeasurably. Revenge was sweet. Sorbière had publicly humiliated him in front of his academy. Yet now it was he, not Sorbière, who was the talk of scientific Paris. Clearly his bet on Denis and his efforts to restore glory to his private academy seemed to have paid off.

Denis visited his patient every day in the week that followed the first two transfusions. When the physician declared with great pride that Mauroy had been fully cured, Mauroy and his wife eventually returned to their modest home. Perrine was hopeful that the past was behind them but had a lingering sense of dread that her husband's newfound calmness was temporary. She was right. Mauroy remained in “that good condition” for about two months. The man's state of health and mind changed abruptly when—Denis explained, eager to cast blame somewhere—the
too frequent company with his wife and his debauches in wine, tobacco, and “strong waters” (alcohol) had cast him into a very violent and dangerous fever.”
⁴
With his brain warmed by the fever's vapors, the mad man's ravings soon returned, even worse than before.

Early one morning in mid-February, Madame Mauroy left her village home and rushed to Paris to urge the transfusionist to perform a third surgery. Something in Perrine's demeanor had completely changed. The once-timid woman showed up on Denis' doorstep in a fury. She was filled with a boldness that made her nearly unrecognizable to those who knew her only as Mauroy's battered and mousy wife. The source of her newfound confidence was still a mystery, and it would not be unveiled until many months later. But clearly she felt empowered. She snapped at his housekeepers in a voice filled with a strange and urgent authority: Denis would meet with her—or else. With a belligerence that surpassed her social standing, she threatened to have a Paris judge force Denis to transfuse her husband if he would not do it of his own accord.

Informed of the unannounced visitor, Denis spoke with Emmerez, and the men decided to make a house call to the Mauroy family home. Denis' carriage slogged through the muddy paths that led to Perrine's ramshackle abode in the middle of what seemed like nowhere. Perrine walked briskly up to the men and, sparing few words, ushered them into the one-room house. Mauroy howled at Denis and Emmerez as they entered; he had been tied tightly by his arms and legs to the couple's bed. In the center of the room surgical tools and bloodletting bowls neatly lined the wobbly dining table. Perrine gestured outside to a calf that was tied to a nearby fence, and she ordered them to begin the procedure immediately. Nothing about the situation was right; Denis could sense it. Perrine certainly did not have the resources
to buy such tools, nor could she have known what specific implements they required for the procedure. And the calf? The Mauroys had barely enough money to feed themselves, much less to buy an animal specifically for the procedure. Moving slowly back toward the door, Denis and Emmerez informed the woman firmly but politely that her husband was in no condition for the operation.

Before the men had a chance to leave, Perrine moved toward the light of a nearby lamp. Turning to the men, she displayed her mottled face, black and blue from her husband's beatings. Then she crumpled to the floor in tears. She pleaded with them not to leave without giving her “the satisfaction of having tried all possible means to recover [her] husband.”
⁵
Her distress was artful, Denis explained later, and the men agreed against their better judgment to transfuse Mauroy one more time. Reluctantly Emmerez first passed a narrow tube into the vein of Mauroy's arm and capped it off. Next he opened a vein in the man's foot because, as was now commonly believed, old blood needed to be removed when new blood was infused. Suddenly Mauroy's body shook in a “violent fit.” Every limb of his body trembled wildly. “There issued no blood out of the foot, nor the arm,” Denis later insisted emphatically. And Emmerez had no choice, according to Denis, but to remove the tube from the man's arm and stitch him back up without opening the artery of the calf. When the men left Perrine's house they were troubled by what they had seen. Mauroy died the next day.

As soon as Denis heard the news of his patient's death, he summoned Emmerez to his side. The companions replayed every detail of the last transfusion. Mauroy was clearly not in his right mind when they arrived at the Mauroys'. But other than the unexpected seizure, he had shown no other signs of illness or infirmity. There had to be a reason for his death; it was surely
not the result of a transfusion. Of this Denis could not have been more certain: No blood had actually been transfused into Mauroy. The calf's artery had not even been opened when Mauroy began having seizures. And the two men, Denis insisted, had left without transfusing Mauroy. Yet, the man was dead. It did not make sense.

In a quest to discover the truth, Denis and Emmerez climbed into a carriage next morning to visit Mauroy's widow. They wanted to know what her husband's last hours had been like, what his symptoms had been; after this they would perform an autopsy. When Denis and Emmerez came face-to-face with the man's widow, it was clear that she was not at all pleased to see them. She was now as difficult to reason with as her husband had been. Denis tried to coax information, any information, from the widow about her husband's final hours. But Perrine was hostile and unhelpful. Mauroy's thin body, blue and cold, was stretched out on the couple's rope bed. Denis visually inspected what he could of the corpse, as Emmerez placed his tool kit on the table in the center of the room. As soon as Perrine understood that the two men intended to perform an autopsy, she exploded. Enraged, she chased them from her home. Unwilling to back down, Denis yelled over his shoulder at Perrine as he stomped to the carriage. He made it clear that they would return the next morning “to do the thing by force.”

As anxious and now angry as Denis was, he likely sensed that one additional day would not make a difference. He hoped that the widow would find a way to calm herself by morning and allow them to get to the bottom of the mystery in a more rational way. Plus, time seemed to be on their side. Denis was certain that the penniless widow could ill afford the burial expenses; Antoine Mauroy would still be there in the morning.

Denis underestimated Perrine Mauroy. As soon as the trans
fusionist's carriage was out of sight, she sprang into action and began making frantic arrangements to bury her husband with “all speed.” What Denis failed to remember was that the widow Mauroy had been surprisingly able to cull the resources she needed when she put her mind to it. She had somehow found a way to procure a calf and the necessary surgical instruments for him to transfuse her husband for the third and last time. And once again, by some mystery, she was able to buy a coffin for her dead husband and pay the gravediggers. Denis and Emmerez returned the next morning as promised, but Mauroy's corpse was gone: It was already in the ground.

 

I
n the days that followed the widow's odd behavior, the transfusionist reviewed every conversation he had had with Perrine and her husband while Mauroy was still alive. There was no doubt that the widow was hiding something. At various moments before and after the first transfusions, Mauroy had howled in panic—convinced that his wife was plotting his death. At the time he and Emmerez had brushed his fears aside as the wild ravings of an insane man. Now they wondered if it was possible that underneath the exterior of this seemingly fragile woman, as bruised and as battered as she was, there lurked the heart of a murderer. But without a body, Denis worried that there would be no way to discover the truth.

Mauroy's death offered Denis' detractors a most welcome chance to take the arrogant transfusionist down a notch. The number of transfusion's foes was growing daily, especially now that the stalwart members of Paris Faculty of Medicine, Perrault and Lamy, had turned their resistance to the procedure into a cause célèbre. Then there was the pirate-turned-Paris-physician Martinière, whose invectives against transfusion were becoming shriller with each passing day. In the weeks following his vivid dream, Mar
tinière had published at his own expense a series of treatises and letters to prominent doctors, court members, and parliamentarians decrying transfusion. While not a member of the Paris Faculty of Medicine, Martinière had found ways to make a name for himself among its members. It was not hard. Martinière's animated and hyperbolic stance toward transfusion had been coupled with the manners of a man who had spent his youth among unruly and uncouth seafarers. The Paris physicians could hardly disagree with what he was saying. And Martinière had recently discovered a kindred spirit in the influential Guillaume Lamy, who was leading the Paris Faculty of Medicine's charge against transfusion.