Blood Work (11 page)

These principles were woven into the fabric of Sorbière's very being; he was committed to making sure that Montmor would fully occupy his rightful place as unquestioned head of his own academy—both for the good of the institution and especially as something of a Hobbesian social experiment. The academy was, he believed, an example of French society in miniature: Rules, regulations, and a central authority were required to maintain peace and ensure progress.
¹⁷

Several years earlier Sorbière had drafted academy regulations in nine articles and presented them publicly to the group. Sorbière's bylaws declared that Montmor alone would set the agenda for each meeting. The master of the house would also have sole authority to designate at will two colleagues to report on their opinions, uninterrupted, about a subject of the nobleman's choosing. All commentary would be written ahead of time and logged in by the permanent secretary, Sorbière himself. “Any interruption during the presentation,” he declared, “would not be tolerated.” Only in this way would the academy cease wasting its time on “vain exercise of the mind on useless subtleties.”
¹⁸
While Sorbière espoused a more dictatorial approach to academy business, the ever-amiable Montmor's approach was instead one of accommodation. Enamored of the intellect of the men he had recruited to his home, Montmor had proved himself nonetheless incapable of maintaining order in his stunning collection of scientific enfants terribles. Now, in the wake of Fouquet's arrest and imprisonment, the Hobbesian Sorbière had found a sure-footed, decisive leader whom he could respect. For as much as the nobles may have groused quietly about the shocking treatment of Fou
quet at the king's hands. they learned quickly the dangers of testing the king's patience and kept their discontent quiet.

During his tenure as permanent secretary, Sorbière had always paid attention to the direction of the political winds. Out of his newfound admiration for the decisive young king in the wake of the Fouquet affair, he shifted alliances. On Tuesday, April 3, 1663, Sorbière stood before the Montmor Academy. He began by thanking Montmor for his years of dedication to scientific inquiry. “It is certain,” Sorbière proclaimed, “that our illustrious moderator was the first to excite in Paris the studies that we have cultivated here, the curiosity that we have had for the works of God, and our desire to move human industry forward.” Pausing for effect, Sorbière then launched into what sounded very much like a eulogy. “We can only hope that he will continue to show his commitment to his glory and for the public utility by allowing the Academy to pass into the hands of the sovereign.”
¹⁹

“The king is young,” Sorbière told the academy. “He has a good soul, and he has shown that he is open to the idea of creating a general Academy where we might continue our work.” Scientific learning and discovery, Sorbière argued, were pivotal to the king's nationalist program. They were too important to be left to flounder in private academies. Moreover, the idea of allowing noblemen like Montmor to set the agenda when it came to inquiries into the secrets of the natural world would not only be counterintuitive to the Sun King's efforts to consolidate his power—it would stunt the very progress of science. Sorbière made sure that a copy of his speech found its way to the Louvre. Attached to it was a letter to Colbert. It contained, of course, the familiar sycophantic praise for which Sorbière had become infamous: “You will see that my harangue of April 3,” he wrote, “could lead to something important for the public if it is considered by those who work for the ornamentation of France.” He
had no hopes of securing personal gain in sharing the speech, Sorbière claimed disingenuously to Colbert. He was most interested in ensuring that he and other natural philosophers could focus on the “business of the sciences.”

Colbert swatted Sorbière away like a pesky fly. He did not trust Sorbière and found his self-interested requests a nuisance. The prime minister refused to recommend the idea to the king on financial grounds as well. A fiscal conservative, Colbert found himself signing off on more pricey expenditures than he could bear. The construction of Versailles was in full swing. At every turn the king expanded the blueprints and demanded that the palace be built with the most renowned artisans and with the most expensive materials possible. The king had already made plans for a seven-day-long spectacle to celebrate his beloved mistress, Mademoiselle de La Vallière, which meant that construction became more frenzied and exorbitantly costly as workers rushed to meet the summer deadline.

While Colbert seemed initially lukewarm, Sorbière's speech rang clearly in the ears of the scientists at Montmor's academy. It was true that they would remain forever grateful to Montmor and his willingness to offer “the infinity of machines and instruments” and, of course, his legendary banquets.
²⁰
But even the well-heeled son of
Montmor le Riche
could not offer all that was required for scientific progress. “In truth, Messieurs,” Sorbière said with conviction, “only Kings, and rich Sovereigns, or some wise and wealthy Republics could undertake to outfit a Science Academy engaged in continuous experimentation.” Until then “our Mechanics will remain imperfect as they are, our Medicine will be blind, and our Sciences will teach us with certainty only that there is an infinity of things about which we know nothing.” Pulling no punches, Sorbière took special aim at the hopes Montmor had pinned on astronomy. “Just think of the space needed for observation of the
stars, and of the size of the apparatus necessary for a forty-foot telescope…. Was not Tycho Brahe forced to build his Uraniborg, a castle not so much for lodgings as for the making of celestial observations?”

Built during the last decades of the sixteenth century, Uraniborg held the title of Europe's first dedicated observatory. It sat on a tiny island close to Copenhagen and had been a gift from the Danish king Frederick II to support Brahe's research. The astronomer was unyielding in his attention to detail and in his insistence that observations not remain in the realm of the general but of the meticulously specific. He insisted that the instruments he designed be checked regularly for accuracy and that descriptions of planetary orbits be made at every point in the orbit. As a result Brahe's detailed astronomical data had been indispensable to Johannes Kepler in his work on planetary motion and his discovery that planets trace elliptical paths. By invoking Brahe's name, Sorbière was no doubt trying to capture the attention of the star of the Montmor Academy: Christian Huygens. The arguments must have had traction for Huygens because by early 1663 he also took up the argument for a national academy of sciences. “There is a great desire,” Huygens complained to a colleague, “to make some more solid and regular establishment for an Academy than it has had up to this time, and for some time various consultations to this end have been held; with all that however, we make little progress, so that even the most zealous begin to despair of success.”
²¹

 

C
olbert's initially chilly reception of such petitions shifted dramatically in late 1664 and early 1665, when the stunning comets many claimed were responsible for London's miseries hit the skies and rattled all of Europe. In Paris astronomers and lay observers alike stayed up into the wee hours to marvel at the stunning light
in the sky. Comets brought change, of this there was no doubt. Even the musketeer D'Artagnan was said to have spent an entire night awake, staring at the comet and perhaps wondering what its arrival meant for the work of his squadrons.
²²
The astronomers pressed their case and argued that a large observatory needed to be built so that France could master celestial secrets instead of gazing up at the skies in fear.

Colbert was now clearly in the mood to listen. For an insider's perspective about what was happening in the scientific community, Colbert turned to Jean Chapelain, a longtime friend of Montmor and a dedicated member of his academy. The graying Chapelain knew well enough that friendship mattered little when one was called to the king's service. By July 1665 Chapelain had given Colbert a list of eighty-two exceptional men worthy of royal protection: Montmor was not one of them.
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Yet at the top of Chapelain's list was Christian Huygens, the star of the nobleman's private academy.
²⁴

If comets had filled the skies in 1664 and 1665, 1666 was marked by a stunning solar eclipse on July 2. Now fully convinced of the importance of astronomical research, Colbert offered his own home for observations. Huygens, Adrien Auzout, and Pierre de Roberval—all former members of the Montmor Academy—joined several others at Colbert's residence at the crack of dawn. They arrived bearing two telescopes, a sextant, a pendulum clock (which had been invented by Huygens), as well as other instruments.
²⁵
It is not certain whether Colbert himself joined the men, but it had become exceedingly clear that he had joined their cause—and if he wanted full use of his home again, a different setting needed to be found.

On December 22, 1667, the first official meeting of the French Academy of Sciences took place without fanfare. The academy had received the official approval of Louis XIV—and early sci
ence was now an endeavor of the Crown, rather than something bankrolled by wealthy private patrons. The academy was given full access to the king's personal library at 8 rue Vivienne, not far from where the nineteenth-century Opéra Garnier now stands, and just a few doors from Colbert's own home at 2 rue Vivienne.

Prime Minister Colbert had made good on his promises to provide royal support for science. The private academies, such as Montmor's, had outlived their usefulness, and the academicians needed resources that only a king could provide. In exchange each member knew that he now served at the pleasure of Louis XIV—who lavished handsome rewards for unquestioned loyalty, and equally elaborate punishments for anything less. Huygens was offered a financial arrangement that he could not refuse. He enjoyed an annual stipend that was nearly four times what the average French academician earned—plus spacious living quarters in the king's library.
²⁶
The monarch also made a promise that the housing arrangement would be temporary. To accommodate both the research needs and creature comforts of the country's now-premier astronomer, an observatory rivaled by no other would be built at a location of the academy's choosing. Huygens had long stood at the center of the Montmor Academy. Now he was on the king's payroll.

The Montmor Academy “had ended forever,” wrote Huygens. “However, it seems that from the wreckage of this one another may be born.”
²⁷
Montmor had been betrayed. He had been undermined by Sorbière, surpassed by Huygens, and abandoned by his own academy. There is little trace of Montmor between the troubled exodus that followed Sorbière's speech in 1663 and the official establishment of the Academy of Sciences by Colbert in December 1666. Did Montmor step aside because he understood the futility—and great personal risk—of competing against Louis XIV and his royal resources? If he did, it was not for long.

As Montmor watched the ever-confident Jean-Baptiste Denis transfuse the blood of a young healthy dog into a mangy old one on the banks of the Seine, the nobleman felt confident that Denis would soon become a celebrity in Paris. As he had with Gassendi and Huygens, Montmor resolved to provide the transfusionist with everything he needed to lock in his fame. And thanks to the transfusionist, perhaps the nobleman could compete with the king's Academy of Sciences after all.

I
n the months that followed the demise of Montmor's private academy, one of the principal tasks of the newly established French Academy was to use science to the strategic benefit of the country and the glory of the king. For the academy's geographers, astronomers, and mathematicians, this meant developing surveying techniques to aid the king's armies in their conquests. The job of engineers and physicists was to develop better gunpowders, water pumps, and visionary machines for travel and production. For the physicians it was time to compete fully with the English in the biomedical realm. That meant engaging, for better or for worse, in the blood wars. While triumph in the medical realm would not be as spectacular as a hard-won victory on the battlefield, it would nevertheless be proof of France's superiority over England.

The Academy of Sciences had just begun setting up its laboratory in two wings of the king's library. Overlooking a manicured winter garden, the main experiment room was itself a chaotic work in progress. Half-opened wooden boxes were strewn across
the room—and were overflowing with everything an inquisitive seventeenth-century mind might desire. Vials of brightly colored powders, acids and sulfur, alembics, mortars and pestles, magnifying glasses and microscopes, buckets and bowls—and, of course, ropes to restrain the ever-present animals who would face these and other tools of science.

The academy members had their choice of any number of exotic beasts that they could dismantle, layer by decaying layer. Their subjects came directly from Louis XIV's menagerie at Versailles. Built between 1662 and 1664, this early precursor to zoos was home to more than 123 different types of mammals, which were joined by nearly 239 varieties of birds as well as at least 10 types of amphibians, from chameleons to crocodiles.
¹
Culled from locales around the globe, the most unusual creatures were more than curiosities; they were jaw-dropping marvels whose odd bodies and deeply colored plumes, fur, or scaled skins tested the limits of the imagination. In this era when tomatoes, coffee, and chocolate had only begun to enter France by way of new travel routes, the very sight of semimythic creatures like a wild lion or an elephant could render a Frenchman speechless.

The animals themselves did not usually fare well. Many were not suited to cold, damp French winters; others starved and died as the result of neglect or were deformed by spending days on end trapped in small cages.
²
Versailles' loss, though, was the Academy of Science's gain. When an animal died, its carcass was delivered immediately to the physicians and anatomists at the king's library or, sometimes, to an academy member's home. As might be imagined, dissection rooms were rarely pleasant spaces, and the Academy of Science's laboratories were no exception. The English traveler Martin Lister wrote later in the seventeenth century that “a private Anatomy room is…very irksome if not
frightful: Here a Basket of Dissecting Instruments, as Knives, Saws, &c. and there a Form with a Thigh and Leg flayed, and the Muscles parted asunder: On another Form an Arm served after the same manner: Here a Trey full of Bits of Flesh.”
³
Shipments of eaux-de-vie, clear and potent spirits usually distilled from fruit, regularly accompanied deliveries of royal animal cadavers. Used to flush rotting body cavities, the spirits also did double duty as a hand cleanser and were often drunk by the anatomists as a way to steady their nerves and stomachs.

Camels, porcupines, lions, monkeys, ostriches, and chameleons: Claude Perrault dissected them all. The steely-eyed Perrault had been tapped by Colbert to explore the truth behind English claims of transfusion. Perrault was less than thrilled at the idea of the newly formed academy becoming involved in blood trials. Like many medical men in Paris, he had been deeply troubled when news of the English transfusion experiments had crossed the Channel into France. Instead of letting blood
out
of veins and arteries as doctors had been doing for centuries, doctors were now being asked to consider ways to put blood
in
. Scandalous and counterintuitive to an extreme, transfusion would be a very hard sell.

As a graduate of the medical school at the University of Paris, Perrault was hardly predisposed to innovation. The most conservative medical school in Europe, the University of Paris had a long-earned reputation for being militantly attached to the theories of Galen and Hippocrates and for battling tenaciously against rival ideas. As every physician who had ever trained at the University of Paris knew without a glimmer of doubt, Galen was more than just correct in his teachings; his philosophy was “unimpeachable,” perhaps even “divinely inspired.”
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Bearing the weight of all medical knowledge, Galen's conclusions were like the columns of an ancient monument: To question Galen was to risk demolishing the very temple of medicine.

As Perrault had during his own university studies, Parisian medical students still repeated by heart and without question that the body's inner workings were the result of a “cooking” process that depended on heat. Food could not be transformed into chyle without heat. Without chyle, there could be no blood. And without blood, men would be unable to create semen, and women could not produce breast milk (Galen had argued that both were produced from blood). And if heat produced these key products for reproduction and life, then severe chill meant illness, infertility—or worse—death.

Claude Perrault's own approach to doctoring followed, chapter, verse, and line, the standard humoral ones he had learned as a medical student at the University of Paris. Claude's traditional methods were put on display when his eldest brother, Jean, fell ill during a fateful sightseeing trip to Bordeaux. While Jean was likely struck by a severe case of typhoid fever, both brothers felt certain that the illness had been brought on by sleeping in sheets that had been dried near roses. The roses, which were known for their cooling effect, had created an imbalance in Jean's humors and had affected his body's ability to retain heat. Jean's uncontrollable shivering was thought to be caused by an excessive loss of heat—which was manifested through a fever—brought on in response to an assault of cold humors. This imbalance could only be recalibrated by an aggressive release of the offending humors through purging and bloodletting.

Claude arranged for a barber-surgeon to administer numerous bleedings to his brother's arms and legs. When bleeding seemed no longer to have any effect, they tried to place leeches behind Jean's ears, but blistering there from other treatments with warming salves kept the leeches from doing their work. Bouillons, enemas, and purgings accompanied each bleeding in a desperate attempt to save Jean's life. And to these were added chest rubs
with concoctions of ground pearls mixed with extract of hyacinth bulbs to warm Jean's blood, as well as the placement of gutted pigeons on his scalp to create heat to stave off the shivering. Despite Claude's heroic attempts to save his brother (or perhaps because of them), Jean died a few weeks later.
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As a founding member of the Academy of Sciences, Perrault took his duties just as seriously and held just as tightly to tradition in his research as he did in his medical practice. Prime Minister Colbert charged Perrault with looking into English claims regarding blood transfusion. Perrault was not pleased. He found the very notion of transfusion too fanciful, and perhaps even too disturbing, to take seriously. But whatever the prime minister—which meant, by extension, the king—asked of him, Perrault did through the blunt force of will.

Perrault agreed to form a committee to look into the matter. Beginning in January 1666, nearly two months before Denis' public transfusion on the banks of the Seine, Perrault and two colleagues launched quietly into a series of transfusion experiments in the king's library.
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Barking defensively and straining at their leashes, two dogs were tied to the room's central table. The astronomer Auzout ignored their protests as he rooted through boxes in search of items that might be of use in the experiment. Auzout had worked diligently with Huygens to persuade Colbert and the king to establish the new academy, and he was eager to help in any way he could to get the group's research off the ground, even if it meant meddling in blood. Stepping gingerly around the dogs, the surgeon Louis Gayant lifted his large surgical box onto the table and slipped a stiff blood-stained apron over his embroidered clothes; a somber Perrault tossed another log in the fireplace.

Once Auzout confirmed that the dogs were strapped down and their muzzles tied, Perrault and Gayant readied their scalpels—
just as their English colleagues had done. Again high-pitched cries of pain echoed against the cavernous ceilings of the library quarters as the two men sliced into the animals. They quickly inserted the tubes into the vein of one dog and the artery of the other, uniting them exactly as the Royal Society had done. Blood rushed copiously out of each of the dogs, into the cannulas, and onto the table. Perrault's eyes narrowed as they traced the blood dripping to the floor. Staring transfixed in annoyance and confusion, he felt his own blood rush to his face in frustration. Nothing, it seemed, had made its way into the transfusion tubes. The experiment had failed.

Perrault watched in mounting anger as the dogs took their last breaths. He and his colleagues had just failed to pull off an experiment that their competitors, the English virtuosi, claimed was possible. Now he would have to repeat this bloody procedure—and he was not pleased at the thought.

For the University of Paris–trained Perrault and the Academy of Sciences of which he was now a part, the inability to replicate the transfusion experiments meant clearly that the English had exaggerated their claims, or even perhaps that they had lied. Moreover, the failed trials confirmed that the traditional teachings that had glued the French medical community together for centuries would remain intact. In fact this outcome may actually have been determined—or at least wished for—long before the trials at the Academy of Sciences began. Perhaps it was not possible to replicate the English transfusion experiments because, simply put, transfusion itself was not possible.

But still, despite his misgivings about transfusion, Perrault was unwilling to give up. Two days after the first unsuccessful experiment, the three men met again. Growling, Perrault made it clear that he and his colleagues would not simply repeat the English trial. The French Academy would modify the entire experi
ment and outdo their competitors once and for all. They would do more, and better. The Royal Society had focused on creating a one-way transfusion, from donor to recipient. With his colleagues Perrault rigged a system whereby blood would flow both ways. Each of the metal tubes inserted into the dogs contained
an uptake cannula as well as an output cannula. That is, each dog would at once be a donor and a recipient. They would, effectively, trade blood. A skilled and trusted metalworker was on-site at the king's library, and he followed the scientists' drawings to the letter as he fabricated special tubes.

FIGURE 12:
Gayant's memo to the Academy of Sciences included hand-drawn sketches of canine-to-canine experiments performed in the French Academy of Sciences during the early months of 1667.

FIGURE 13:
Perrault's system of custom-made double-flow transfusion tubes (January 22, 1667).

This time the transfusion seemed to work. The group mar
veled as they watched one dog's vein beat rhythmically with the artery of the other dog. It was short lived, however; one dog died almost immediately later. Upon dissection of the recipient, clumps of clotted blood were found in the right ventricle of the recipient's heart. As for the other dog, it lived; but it remained morose and feeble long after the experiment—hardly the spirited pup the Royal Society had promised it would become.

The men were likely seeing, but did not know it, evidence of an antigen reaction. Unlike humans, who have only four blood types, dogs have more than a dozen possible blood types. The likelihood of a blood incompatibility reaction is unpredictable. When transfused with the wrong type of blood, some dogs will show no clear reaction. For others, it can be fatal. It is possible that Perrault's recipient dog was especially sensitive to a foreign blood type. Yet there is also another possible explanation for the dog's death. We do know that in later experiments, Perrault was reusing his dogs. He also performed experiments that he did not always record. If he performed other experiments before this one and reused his dogs, this would go a long way toward explaining the academy's failures in replicating the English experiments both in this specific experiment and later ones. If the recipient dog were given the wrong type of blood more than once, a severe, or even deadly, reaction would have likely followed.