Transfusion of animal blood into humans

On 23 November 1667, at Arundel House in London, Richard Lower and Edmund King opened the carotid artery of a young sheep and ran its blood through silver pipes and quills into a vein in the arm of Arthur Coga. They first let 6 or 7 ounces of his own blood. The sheep's blood then flowed for at least two minutes, and they judged that he received 9 or 10 ounces before he said he had had enough.

Coga felt well during and after the operation. He wrote his own account, claiming more benefit than the two physicians were yet willing to grant, and asked for a repeat within three or four days; they chose to wait longer. King reported the case to the Royal Society on 5 December, and it was printed in the Philosophical Transactions of 9 December 1667.

Paris had got there first, and the London report refers back to the French experiment. Jean-Baptiste Denis drew about three ounces of blood from a young man and gave him about three times as much arterial blood from a lamb, starting at five in the morning. He described the case in a letter on a new way of curing sundry diseases by transfusion, printed in London in 1667.

Denis went on to treat a man named du Mauroy, whom he described as mad, and he claimed that two transfusions had cured him. When the man fell ill again, his wife pressed for a third. The surgeon Emmerez began it, but no blood would flow from the patient, the pipe was withdrawn before any calf's blood passed, and du Mauroy died the following night. His wife blocked an autopsy, and Denis later reported witnesses who said she had put arsenic in her husband's broth.

In April 1668 the criminal court of the Châtelet in Paris ordered that no transfusion be made on a human body without the approval of physicians of the Paris Faculty. The Royal College of Physicians museum records that authorities in Paris, London and Rome went on to forbid transfusions into humans.