The subject of this experiment was Arthur Coga, an indigent Bachelor
of Divinity of Cambridge, aged about thirty-two. It is recorded in
the _Philosophical Transactions_ that the experiment was performed by
Richard Lower and Edmund King at Arundel House on November 23, 1667,
in the presence of many spectators, including several physicians.
Coga, when asked why he had not the blood of some other creature
transfused into him, rather than that of a sheep, replied: “Sanguis
ovis symbolicam quandam facultatem habet cum sanguine Christi, quia
Christus est agnus Dei.”[4] It was estimated that Coga received eight
or nine ounces of blood, but he seems to have felt no effects, good
or ill, and it is probable that he did not actually receive as much
as this.
These beginnings in England and France led to the more frequent use
of blood transfusion, but soon afterwards the operation fell into
disrepute. Disasters followed the transfusions, and the practice also
met with violent opposition on the ground that terrible results,
such as the growth of horns, would follow the transfusion of an
animal’s blood into a human being. In consequence of this they were
actually forbidden in France by the Supreme Court until the Faculté
of Paris should signify its approval, but the necessary permission
was not given. The “extraordinary success” predicted by Sprat and the
sanguine expectations of Pepys and his friends were destined not to
be fulfilled until a later age.
For more than a hundred years the possibilities of blood transfusion
were almost entirely neglected. There are some isolated references
to it in medical writings towards the end of the eighteenth century,
but of these it is only necessary to notice two. In 1792, at Eye in
Suffolk, blood from two lambs was transfused by a Dr. Russell into
a boy suffering from hydrophobia, and he claimed that the patient’s
recovery was to be attributed to the treatment. Soon afterwards
in 1796 Erasmus Darwin recommended transfusion for putrid fever,
cancer of the œsophagus, and in other cases of impaired nutrition.
He suggested that the blood should be transferred from donor to
recipient through goose quills connected by a short length of
chicken’s gut, which could be alternately allowed to fill from the
donor and emptied by pressure into the patient. This operation he
never actually performed.
[Illustration: Fig. 1.--BLUNDELL’S IMPELLOR
From _Researches Physiological and Pathological_, 1824]
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