and it started because i was planning for a class. i teach -- as you heard i teach at vanderbilt university where i have the opportunity to teach a whole variety of classes. and one of my favorite classes is, of course, on the history of medicine from aristotle to the enlightenment. and one of the lectures that i needed to prepare was on the early discovery of this blood circulation in 1628 and i did what any good professor does. i was cramming for my lecture. and i was looking around what i needed to tell the story and i was looking for some interesting stories. and i stumbled on a reference to blood transfusion. and that's not something i'd heard about. and i thought, hmmm, this is very interesting. it's incredibly odd and so i started to look around and i discovered that they were transfusing animals to animals in the 1650s -- i'm sorry, 1660s. and they started from using animals to humans and they were

using animals as donors. so that's what i started to look at. and thennion -- they uncovered it they frightened a lot of people. the whole idea of blood transfusions as you can imagine, 100 years of the zoeller of blood types in 1900, 1901, belong before the discovery of anesthesia and antisepsis they were transfusing humans with animal blood. it became even odder -- [laughter] >> just ignore the woman on the screen for a moment. it became even odder when i realized that blood transfusions started quickly and ended just as quickly after there had been a failed transfusion in france. ..

thank you. >> i can do this without the illustration just as well. what's interesting to me is that, but we have any physicians here? okay. can you imagine doing modern medicine without transfusions without the benefit of transfusions? it can't be done, there's no

such thing as bloodless surgery and we of using the patient's blood during the emergency surgeries and trauma surgery of course but for the most part when i talk to physicians and health care professionals it is really hard to imagine modern medicine without the benefits of blood transfusion. the lady of blood transfusion in the 17th century was something those radical because they had spent centuries, millennium in fact imagining all of the different ways they could take blood out of the body. when you get an early madison you think about leeches and lancets and blood boils, right to why is the first thing we imagine an early medicine is bloodletting? what comes down to a very simple but permeating notion of how the body worked from the fifth

century b.c. of hippocrates second century the body was thought to be based on the balance of what recalled humorous and those were essentially fluids in the body. they were blood, phlegm, black vinyl and what they called jell-o by all. when your body is unbalanced those fluids and say that had equilibrium. when you and your health, when you were not healthy it meant that those fluids were out of whack and something needed to be adjusted. now, you could adjust that through nutrition and i will get to why that is in a moment, or the fastest way that you can do it would be easily -- to worry about it, we will just get the slides. the fastest way that you can adjust the body cells would be to remove the ascending humours.

so, that was the first case of action. when i get sick, i reach for example ibuprofen if i have a headache or fever or something. the first thing you would do if you were sick in the 17th century and long before is you would reach four barbara surgeon, the same person who would give you a shave would be the same who would to your bloodletting or major surgery as well. >> bloodletting is quite radical. another thing is blood was produced against the humors. it's that was produced through the act of eating so you would eat something, you would digest it, it would be concocted in your liver and then move up to the heart and the heart operated like a furnace, right? that's how your body got its energy and got its heat. they didn't know what the relationship of breeding and a year and oxygenating, putting oxygen into your blood secure

stoking the fires to breathe out you were easily plan of the fumes. we are getting used pulling blood out and we were also understanding blood was something there was definitely produced and digestive system. something very important that in the 16 twenties and that was the discovery of blood circulation and that's where i started with william harvey. william harvey started to wonder not just about the basis of the way of understanding the body he also started to wonder is this possible that all of this blood in the body is produced by the digestive system. that got people thinking and doing experiments both with cadavers and then animal bodies he started to test this notion first of all in trying to figure out what these are. what do these files do? we don't know yet about the

blood circulating it was thought that either the reinforced the veins or it kept all of the fluids pulling down into the feet, right? so he started first wondering what these were. then he performed primarily first on a small animals like rabbits but their hearts are beating so fast you couldn't really catch it then he started to move towards slow and cold-blooded animals like snakes, and he was watching it and started to get close to the idea of circulation and then he did a dissection on a human, he cut open a human heart, measured the amount of blood in one of the cavities, one of the chambers of the heart determined there was 2 ounces of blood in one of the chamber's counted the number of heartbeats and average human would have over 30 minutes

in what he did a simple multiplication and found out the body through this immoral system of lovemaking and for the fact the heart would have to burn off all of this he figured that there would have to be an obscene amount of blood produced in shorter period of time something like 540 pounds of blood would have to be produced and something as short as a half hour and he said that there is no way that this would be possible for him to imagine. so he speculated and propose to the notion of blood circulation. from there that set off a whole flurry of experiments in england by some people you probably recognize, christopher wren, the greatest architect of london, christopher actually started his career as a natural philosopher as they call dr. set time, and what he began to do is he began

to inject animals with all different types of fluids, crazy fluid like opium and beer and wine and milk because the idea was if harvey is wrong and blood doesn't circulate, then you put this stuff, you bypass the digestive system, put this stuff into the vein and would go to the heart and be burned off and there would be no immediate effect and there would be no lasting affect but he was seeing his dogs and drunk and stoned and see many dogs dead, and that allowed the early natural philosophers in england to imagine not just in fusion but now if we can put this stuff, opium, beer, wine, milk, water what would happen if we start to put other things like blood and in the 16 sixties that idea started to move forward, and particularly the started to wonder what if we took the blood of one dog and moved it into

another dog? in the 16 sixties richard lower a member of the royal society began his first experiments and the dog is survived. in english were getting very, very close to the whole idea this is working a dog may be but we can start doing is imagining transfusion in humans the great fire of london, the plague and excited as the english word about doing these transfusion experiments they had a lot of challenges to be able to move forward. across the channel in france, different things were happening. there was no great fighter. they were building miti policies like ever saw the they were extremely conservative. in fact the french catholics think that the whole idea of circulation is disgusting. sacrilege even to the fact that

sacrilege and in the sense that everything is to be known about the body is indeed already known. dave lent and a party is headed and how your right. so, they are hearing the english are doing these experiments, they don't want to be doing them, but england and france are in this thick of a space race if we can talk anachronistic week. the whole idea of nation-building is developing, and for a nation to have prominence, you have to be victors both on the battlefield, but you also have to be victors in science. so the french in the academy, the french academy of science, the start to do these experiments hopefully to determine that the english are wrong and their experiments didn't work. and it took me awhile to figure out how is it that the english has such great success in the 16 sixties and the french did not? and you are all thinking, too, how is it they can be doing this

with animals because we know the animals have blood types in fact more than humans, and they don't know anything about anesthesia, they don't know anything about an septics or what type of visit the animals can survive leader as i will tell you as humans did. there are three variables if you talk to the immunologists the first is how fast blood goes, second is how much and third whether there has been previous exposure. it's very likely that not a lot of blood got into these animals to begin with. why? because they were using rudimentary, no surprise, really rudimentary systems for transfusion, the first transfusion among animals were done with coos clips city would recut on animals and gently in search of the goose quill wrapped around other plane and then connect the dogs that way. we know through the case reports the blood didn't move very fast and and many times clotted the

minute it went through the coil. but that still didn't answer my question as to why did the french expert in that sale? it turns out after it spent a lot of time working in the archives of the academy of science and looking at the manuscript minutes of the secret experiments is that they were reusing their dogs. so in many of the experiments the dogs had a third variable had previous exposure. well, the french determined their experiments failed, that the english would of course lawyers and they were happy about that. but at the same time, and this is the focus of my work and the focus of my book, a fascinating character trained in the south of france in a competing school, the university is a competing school in the 17th century to the illustrious paris faculty of medicine at the university of

paris and that school was highly traditional, and if you want to practice in paris you absolutely have to get your degree of the faculty of medicine. you also have to be of a noble class, well bred, and you have to have a lot of connections. this southern french men, this of low birth, his father was an artisan trained in the rival school, but that didn't stop him from wanting to go off to paris to make a name for himself. what's the easiest way to make a name for yourself? for any of you that have children, you know that the children to get your attention they do what you don't want them to do. and that is heated. he decided he wanted to enrage the paris elite and to put his name on the map by performing transfusion experiments. he wanted to do this with the dogs just like english on the west bank and the latin quarter of paris and as any of you visited paris and will visit

paris when she's just imagine it because that's many times in my research imagining wendy's transfusions were taking place. if you're facing this you are looking at the show with a fountain and to conceive the banks and there are these very large buildings, his apartment is in one of those buildings buried nearby. so he does these experiments in his home and we have no idea what his wife fought about this. then what some success he moved his experiments public and began doing them on the banks, and that's the way you get attention. you make a big announcement. on sunday at 2 p.m. on will transfuse eight mangy dog with a healthy dollop,, one,, alt. you can imagine the french elite against transfusion and circulation with a have to say

about it they were enraged. what's interesting is with his great success with dogs decide the most important way that he's going to make a name for himself he's going to try to scoop the english. the english are this close to performing their own human transfusions. so he said i'm going to beat them to it. so, he performs his first transfusion experiment in 1667 on a young feverish boy. we don't know how he got the patient. a very likely he paid the parent. he transfused this young boy with calf blood and the boy survived it that in the 17th century is a major criteria for success. right? of the second transfusion is of a butcher. i can't be sure of this, but from what i can tell, the first butcher who provided the sheep for the boy was a very colorful

man. in fact after the transfusion he said hey are you going to let that man to go to waste? let me take it. will be a great dinner for my wife and for me. second transfusion is a butcher who equally yes, sure. he's not sick. he just offers himself of for pay, transfused with sheep blood and survived. my favorite story in all of this is that shortly after the transfusion the transfusion this is walking down the streets of paris, looks into a tavern and sees a butcher. he's going to tell the butcher off. the butcher, the jovial butcher is a job because he used all of his earnings to buy beer, then suddenly surrounded by a whole bunch of other workers. transfuse me. as of the transfusion this leaves and says pretty good. i'm going to transfuse somebody else. this is where it gets very

interesting. if he reaches for the most famous man in paris in the 16 sixties, a man who is well-known in the most elite part of town for running around, he's mentally ill, running around naked, screening, setting homes on fire is the most illustrative military elite, their homes being set afire but he's also beloved because he has been a valet to save in this area is at once a laughing stock feared and beloved. said he believes successfully he will have sealed his name. the plot is in effect because it takes to be critical of money as we know. she has a very wealthy benefactor. they put him off the streets of

paris, tie him to get chair and transfuse him with calf blood. and this is the first time that you really see the clear evidence of a reaction. he starts to scream. his arm is turning red and getting hot and he starts to vomit. his head is spinning. they decide stop, stop. we are going to stop this transfusion right away to read a shuffle them off into a servants' quarters and he's called and he's happy and he seems cured actually of his madness. second transfusion was equally well above the calf blood and in fact the man's wife comes and finds her husband running on the streets and is bewildered. she says to the transfusion is what did you do to my husband? and in the full of the moon he would be beating me and now he's

telling me he loves me and he's very calm. it's very likely the man was just sick and didn't have a lot of energy in him. the man and his wife go off into their homes often to the village meanwhile leader they get in on the door say my husband is at it again you need to transfuse him now. he refuses and can't help himself. he goes out and begins the transfusion long after the man is dead. he's accused of murder and it looks like he is actually going to be held on murder charges. what is very interesting in this is that there is a court case and he says i didn't do it. the widow is suggesting to me that there is something amiss. and there was something mighty ms is in the court case the interview the widow and neighbors and just about anybody that you can think about, and

was determined that a murder had happened. was not for, the animal blood that may or may not have flooded his veins that he had been poisoned by arsenic. and on top of that, in the court records it says that three physicians and named physicians were responsible. then the rest of the court case said there will be no further transfusions without the express approval of the paris that of the of medicine. that's not going to happen for the reasons i told you. they were against the transfusion to begin with. so, as i started to look through this i realized that most of the historical approaches to this case were goodness blood transfusion didn't continue because it was a mess, it was dangerous, it was horrible. i know as somebody that works in the history of medicine that they were doing all different types of surgery is they were

taking bladder stones cutting it to the perineum so deep you could reach your entire hand into somebody's body or worse they were doing penile extractions' of bladder stones. no anesthesia or an aseptic. they were doing more and more syrian as well. and those were done a much more frequently than the blood transfusions and so that got me started when the world could that just be the only answer, is it a blood transfusion stopped and started and thank goodness it stopped so i started to dig a around and figure out who these guys were, these and named physicians who were involved in the arsenic poisoning. and they were hard to find. but let me tell you. so i couldn't find them at first but i thought to myself why would somebody against a blood transfusion? it turns out as you start to look at all of the antiblood transfusion tracks of which

there are many there's a great fear that by moving animal blood into human brains that somehow or another you are going to alter what it meant to be human. but humans start to bark? would dogs start to reason? that could be fascinating for the early 17th century, 18th-century people. why? ase been traveling, all of the new world travel's they've been going and discovering a land unknown, people known. i cannot imagine what the first european might have thought about seeing a draft for the first time to rid of these travelers coming back with stories of sea monsters. yes, they are even coming back with stories of entire villages of people who look like dogs, these baldheaded men. fascinating stories that were fascinating and frightening. now science had the ability as odd as it might seem to us the ability to engineer it seemed

monsters and to some very conservative thinkers that was too frightening to the imagined it need to be stopped. here's the question you're thinking, why in the world did they just use human blood? right? well, it makes a lot of sense they would reach for animals. the first is that animals are pure. i've never had a dog or semite all the smoke. my dog barks really loud but i don't think that he's swearing at me. they don't drink, smoke, swear, and also earlier medical practices used animal flesh and fluid on a regular basis, right? if you were sick and feeling overly cold and skidding more towards being phlegmatic what you ought to receive a rauf aide, and you might even sprinkle some dried testicle's on there. sari but these were, and recipes

to enhance health. third reason, they are pure, the second reason it was traditional to use nutrition particularly in animal flesh and fluid. third is the philosopher, the great french philosopher, a man of course we all associate with i think there for ibm, he also had another radical way of understanding the human body. and that was through my and bodied was some. they speculated that animals and humans were identical in the fact that the word machines. we were in the thick of the revolution they are described the science of hydraulics is just now starting, they are creating barometers, everything you can match and is now up for grabs and it's highly mechanical, highly mechanistic. he thinks animals and humans are identical and function as police and pipes.

in reason and the have a soul. he speculates that isn't in the body. mosul islamic per torian. and that makes a lot of sense. that is also -- so in the 16 twenties, it is in the 1630's, the mind body will argument begins in the 1630's, we start to move towards an fusion experiments in the 16 fifties and then we are in tough of the transfusion experiments in the 16 sixties. so if he is right, taking animal blood, pure animal blood and moving into the human body it's something like changing the oil in your car. no big deal. but what if he's wrong? what if as it has long been speculated and discussed and also written down biblically what if the seóul was actually in the blood itself?

and the was very frightening to the many conservative physicians so frightening that they would resort to murdering a transfusion patients and setting him up on these charges. now, it worked, blood transfusion was banned and would not be started up for another 150 years. i will get to that in just one minute. in my research, it was if i could figure out why someone would want to do this, who were they? i researched it and researched it and it's a rough life. i had to go to paris and rome and london and even made an argument to go to dublin because there was a great collection of a protestant french doctors, collections in dublin as a specialized library so i did a lot of trouble for this and each time i thought i was getting closer and closer to the man who

tried to murder the transfusion patients, and i worked on it for three years and began despair because i thought there's no way i can't find them. every time i felt i had the person i couldn't pin it on them and in the and these guys are dead but there is a responsibility that you have. i am accusing long dead people of murder but is still a huge accusation. so i almost started to give up because i had the motive, i thought some of the people might have been involved but i just couldn't find for sure who did. so i decided to give up on the project because i couldn't figure out who did it and they're goes many years of my life so what if i had a lot of great french food and french wine? i was in my study it national it was going to put away my notes and inventory my notes very meticulous research and i spent a couple of weeks saying tie-in with the document is, numbering

it, putting it in the garden and getting ready to put this project we. and for anybody that has done research you know that the last few days of being an archive for because there are so many things you want to look at, manuscripts and books you know you can't get anywhere else but you only have a couple more days so you end up spending a fortune of reproduction costs. i see people nodding. what happens in the libraries, it can take forever to get them, six, eight weeks, two months. so as i was putting away my documents, in fact it was even a marriage emblem from a fringe library. what is this? i open it up and yeah, yeah, i remember when that was. and i start flipping and i ended up coming across a letter from a lawyer the parliament which is the french equivalent of the supreme court pretty much saying

i should not be writing this letter but to the transfusion best has every reason to fear for his life. a person x and person why should be ashamed of what they did to try to stop the transfusion. i believe desperately that transfusion should be allowed to continue and i looked at it and read it again and thought what? and another couple of months coming back again to france, poland has many things as i could of appeasement whose names i hit seen before looking at their letters, looking at the treatises, and it turned out that they were sitting out in the open. once i had their names. vigilantes' are rarely shy that the names were not known to history, but the documents were

sitting there such a thing of the world wide and probably so. so the fun story i don't know about you but what i need offers an interest in the behind-the-scenes is after i was absolutely sure i looked under every stone and i feel confident i was able to find them i thought this is more than i can handle so i hopped in the car and i was going to go to the ymca and work out and get the energy and i decided to call my husband and she picks up the phone and i start to cry and i said i found him. he said are you okay? i found them. but? what? i found the killers. >> what to wear, what are you talking about? the transfusion killers. and he laughed and he said he just sold a 350-year-old cold case and that's what i did.

but things interesting to me as you suggested is that so many different residences the modern residence to conclude a bit to put the past in a contemporary context and how the past can help guide us as we move into our own a moment i would say of the scientific revolutions. so i knew in 2006 before i find the killers i wanted to read this book in a way that would be compelling not just to an academic audience but also to a general reader interested in scientific revolution and interested in looking at the way that history matters. in 2006 george w. bush in the state of the union address in which he surprised a lot of people in the scientific community saying he's calling for prohibition of human animal hybrids. can out of the blue and i

thought that's weird. and there was a rhetoric to it that sounded an awful lot like the rhetoric of my 17th century guice and so i spent a lot of time in the months afterwards watching the cultural sphere and i realized many of the responses that i was hearing now of course bush was talking about cloning rights, human embryologist and some research, all of those issues surrounding the genomics research and the fear that we will do something to the human species. i heard in the cultural sphere the same type of response this is horrible it must be stopped. i also heard of the people say particularly my science friends we've been doing the interspecies research for a very long time, right? at different gradations, right? whether we are doing grafting heart valves, whether we are

doing it knockout - so they have human diseases all of different types of animals in experiments what's the big deal? then the fun part is looking at all the fun people on the internet during the school things of walking dogs and talking cats and these are a little bit creepy but pigs nursing human babies, those types of things and i realized the sticks of illustrations identical to the same types of interspecies monsters that we saw in the 17th century saw when i started to read this but i wanted to ask three important questions. i wanted to use the past to ask three important questions about where we are now. the first is should society limit our science? because that relationship between science and society is precarious. right?

the second question is if so at what cost? i can't help but to think what transfusion actually have continued and what we have had a transfusion much earlier could we even determine blood types much earlier had the societal responses to transfusion not stopped in its tracks because the experiment in the 1900 was very simple. basically it took a little bit of blood from some colleagues and another colleague, does it coagulate with blood b, c, d, e and then he ended up being able to do some graphs and he determined the first initial blood types. it wasn't a heart experiment and he didn't need lots of tools. could they have done that? that's a moot question. history can't answer those questions. what it lives have been saved? i don't know. with the have been lost? probably. but the third question, what should the relationship of

science and society be, should society put limits on it and if so at what price? the third question is most fascinating to become if we are looking 350 years later that how initial cultural responses were to blood transfusion, something that is complicated but in most circles not problematic, right? how will history, held well people 50, 100, 150 years be looking at us as we are trying to come to terms with our stance toward things like human and religious customs all research? cloning. these seem to be very different technologies but in the end, and this will be like closing point, in the end those technologies are not all that different in the philosophical realm. each one gets up the question of what does it mean to be human? what does it mean not to be human and in the case of the

human embryo logical stem cell research, when does the idea of the humanist begin? and all of those questions when we look at the history of medicine and at the way this society tried to come to terms with different moments of scientific innovation and revolution those are lasting questions that will continue long after. i would love to hear your questions. [applause] >> i have three unrelated questions. when people say [inaudible] are they talking about yellow bile of is that the spleen is that the yellow by all? >> they were not always associated specifically with organs.

flem in fact blood itself contained all of the humors and i will bypass that question because i am reluctant to do that unless i have a good dictionary i'm not sure how to answer that so i don't want to be wrong about it. i will give you my card and look it up and tell you for sure. >> i think it goes back -- >> it has to be really did because in the humor melancholy, melancholy which is an early term for depression is associated with having too much black bile. if somebody is choleric is that because you were leaning towards one human over the other saying when for example? so very certainly that expression related to humor but i wanted to give a bit more and see when it was first used. >> lincoln again referred to the

hypo being hypochondria. was the origin? >> and lincoln's time of course there's still that whole idea of humor continues well into the 19th century. in fact george washington as we know was blood let. possibly historians would say that was it really his throat infection, or the fact that he was a blood clot like crazy? and another interesting thing and i actually open up the book with this is after washington died in 1799, there was the speculation today after that perhaps he could be revived with animal blood. and the family said interesting idea but no, let's let him rest in peace. they were going to try to warm him up to try to get the blood

moving and then transfused him what animal blood so this is not something just located in the 17th century, and the advent of the discovery of the blood circulation doesn't mean that there is a series gone by any means. bloodletting will continue well into the 17th century, and it's again associated with the humor and as you are suggesting associated with a whole range of ways of describing the human body and also describing constrictor -- human character. >> i will limit myself -- >> the third question to be a spirited and turn over to other people. what is your take on the origin -- you mentioned so i'm going to feel that is fair game. what is your take on the origin of that term? was it that julius caesar was actually born that way, that his mother's belly and uterus were cut open and he was extracted that way or is there some other

-- i heard that's a controversial -- >> it's absolutely controversial. >> what are your thoughts on the origin of the term? >> i can tell you that was fought tv to fought since antiquity that is indeed the way he was born. do we know for sure? no. does that mean that the syrian sections were consistently performed for that time forward? note. the first see sections were performed in the early 17th century or claimed to have been performed. the doctor in france rose a whole treatise about how wonderful he was it performing the syrian sections to a great degree that one of his patients had the operation five times and would be very happy to show the world her scars i doubt that he performed those. beginning in the early 17th century the discussion of the cesarean sections began and mr. to see by the mid 17th century not frequently but sometimes and then not as a

regular procedure that we see again controversial now the bigger performing that any funding regular basis to read it is interesting to me that we go from caesar all the way to the 17th century and to my knowledge we don't have really documented evidence that was performed at all with consistency. >> in the roman period? >> absolutely. >> they might have wanted to be the next cesar. >> the question is since we have the roman antiquity reference is that now part and parcel of 17th century particularly in france? absolutely. if you look at the literature of the 17th century, we are deep in the neoclassical period and which they are recuperating text and moving them into the theater and if you take a look at the

architecture of the time as well, the neoclassical model, classical models architecture dominate. to what degree would that have something to with a cesarean section, doubtful but it's also a really good idea of why the french were so beholden to the models of antiquity and the medicine because models of antiquity actually dominated all, permeated much 17th century life not so much in england. the english had more of a tradition i would even say and pushing back against tradition whereas the french are coming against the religious war of the late 16th century and a catholic france pushing against those who would push against tradition. i think it's an interesting question actually of the classical models in france and the relationship between the body and culture.

>> how do they view the blood being the sole with their propensity for bloodletting what did you do with that if it contained the sold you are spilling into the -- >> that's a really good question. i don't know how to answer that. [laughter] i really do not know how to answer that. i will have to think on that. >> i see a little hand back there. >> [inaudible] stat what's that? >> what was it like to find the killers? >> what was it like? it was exciting to me it was also scary, too because as i mentioned, i was accusing people of one of the worst things that you can do. holder you? seven? my daughter was seven when i started this book and she's now about ten and a half and when i started writing this book if she

was very interested in this and i would have all of these by section manuals because they did all types of gross things, they put leeches on people, they would do naturally, and my daughter would walk into the study and go mauney i'm so glad you are a writer and i'm so proud of you but! would you feel the same we've use of the gross drawings? >> mabey. >> i was wondering if you can across any cases of hemophilia and the transfusion to, you know, replace someone who when they believe they just leave and don't stop and if that -- i mean, i feel like hemophilia has a role in history of medicine and kind history in general, did you come across these cases?

>> interestingly in early 17th century that does not seem to be the case. it was more to one as pure experiment in the case of the butcher or in the case of the mentally ill the thought that mental illness again going to the humors, mental illness was the result of overly heated blood so the blood would get too hot, vapors would rise to the brain said it was thought that if they moved the more cooling animal blood into mentally ill people in fact there's another transfusion in england at about the same time as the frenchman that they would be able to calm them down it was never the idea that they could replace blood. early speculation was perhaps what you could do is you could feed intravenously people who were not able to eat. but, taking back of the blood transfusion especially for that

in 1818 the hospital in london was an obstetrics doctor seeing his patient bleed out, hemorrhaging after childbirth and was lamenting something has to be done. and he wondered would it be possible to use transfusion to replace the new mother's blood, and he did a few experiments, not a lot in which he used husband's blood or staff members and they were not highly successful, but that's what's very interesting is after that people started wondering could we then start doing transfusion? and over the next 80 or 90 years it's really fascinating all the different experiments they started to do they were trying to deal with the fact blood come regulates quickly out of the body so they were taking blood and things like, you know, things you make cake with come to see if they could beat it and grab the stuff on it. they were putting all different

types of chemicals into the blood to see to get it from coagulating answer to fast forward by the 1900's were the discovery of blood types by 1914 they discover sodium citrate which keeps the blood from coagulating, and that allows very important innovation so they could start delivering blood remotely because before what they would have to do is it would have to be patients hooked up to patient is in any type of elaborate device. or some physicians were actually stitching veins and arteries together to do the transition from the donor to recipient to be able to do this in 1914 we are right in the world war that allows particularly in the scheme for them and the spanish civil war to be able to collect

blood and no blood types and put it in glass flasks and be able to deliver to the battlefield, and from there, there's the thought of creating the first blood bank, first leningrad in the 1630's and then the hospital in chicago so that is an excellent question. interestingly, my thought as you said the whole idea of trying to stop hemorrhaging is what i think starts the shift to the modern success story if you will of blood transfusion. >> one of the things i think is when we look back at historical practice is we can see that they were resistant to seeing some paradigm shift, what are we any different? so what kind of things did you see in your research that i

don't really know the question that i'm asking, but did they know that they didn't know or did they think that the new i guess is the question? >> are like that question a lot and it is one that is hard to articulate. first, it's tempting. look how much they didn't know, we get the answer, or look how close they were if only they knew. i would say that what is important in every period is in excess of humility and to master the secrets of nature and the body, they recognized how hard that was but that didn't keep them from piling forward just as we are doing the same thing that

we have to be humble howard is history going to be judging us? we have to be humble and think about there's so much more we don't know that we do know. am i touching a little bit on that question? okay. it's hard to articulate, isn't it? >> first i want to say great top. i love the fact your pictures work because you tell such an evocative story and that was great. even though classic images from harvey r. the joy to see as well. so i love the way this works. i keep my question is sort of getting at the signs are maybe science and medicine and you touched on it throughout your talk i wonder this idea of public exhibition of transfusion

or i'm thinking of other things like the miss similarly with some display of botany or donny and electricity and things of that. sort of opening the window to the general public or the of on going public or something like that may be in a france or if you can think about that historically or maybe even today and how we sort of consume this and come to terms with the scientific or medical development. >> that is precisely one of the things i'm interested in. in the 17th century in france i know more about in england in regard to the i guess spectator aspect of science. is that what you are getting at? >> and the comical theater located in medical schools for

the most part, that standard medical anatomical fear you have the cadaver in the center and then the great -- royte? it was more of a closed space and more of a link to space, but it is true when we move into the revolution of the 17th century and definitely into the enlightenment of the 18th century, the educated elite wanted very much to begin to participate in science by -- in paris is the king's garden. they would have regular dissections women of the higher classism a culture where they were very educated elite women would discuss literature the what do these field trips at the king's garden to look at what is going on in these dissections there was a cold rage in the 1680's, 69 these looking at microscopes because it is a big

17th century invention. who is using them? it's not look. it's also women of the upper class is getting preparation and is looking to them under the microscope. some of the tools are expensively and it's an extraordinarily expensive outlay of money but science becomes something educated elite want to be part of and that is when you move into the enlightenment as well as everyone should have an opportunity to learn about the body is working and the university is working. i'm not sure where that takes us to read the whole specter aspect is there. anybody that has gone and seen what the world for a sample, and if you take a look at the internet, all the different ways you can see surgery on youtube because we all have bodies and questions and we want science to be accessible to us. i'm not sure if i answered the question but yes it is something

the starts in this early time period. each period looks a little bit different and has different types of consequences and in france the idf access to knowledge and of formation and rethinking the knowledge and permission to a certain degree has some brutal consequences and the french revolution for example. but i think over time we all have the desire to see what is happening in the body. >> what were the killer's name is? do you know? >> are you going to tell me to give away -- really? really? [laughter] i can't do that. that's what we call a spoiler at the end of the book. [laughter] you might be a little bit too young to read the book, but maybe your mom can read it and give you an idea. i can tell you this is what is funny is that if truth is

stranger than fiction, one of them may actually have known a few pirates, i'm not kidding so there are pirates in this book, too. >> [inaudible] [laughter] >> i'm sure all of us have questions. thank you for your discussion and for being here. i would like to invite holley to sign books if any of you would like [inaudible] we can't allow other exciting opportunities. thank you. [applause] book tv was light from the second annual bup festival

earlier today. for the next five hours join as we cover several panels from the city hall ground in gaithersburg maryland.

>> good morning and welcome to the citadel's peaden buck-offs festival. in addition to being a huge fant of the festival and a good many of the authors year to become i'm the chair of the gaithersburg commission.ere gaithersburg is a city that probably supports the arts and culture and we are pleasedither and culture. we present this event free of charge thanks to support generous sponsors. consideration of everyone here, please silence any devices. this is critical to improving this event. surveys are available here at the information desk and online at our web site and everyone who submits a survey will be entered into the random drawing so please fill out the surveys. we welcome c-span's booktv and viewers across the country. if there's time for audience

questions please make sure to use the microphone so everyone can hear you. tom shroder will be signing books after this presentation and his book is on sale at barnes and noble. tom schroeder -- tom shroder has been writer and editor for many years. he was at washington post magazine which won 2008-2010 pulitzer prize for feature writing. in addition to be an auditor and editor he is one of the foremost editors of humor in the country. he has edited humor columns john barry and launched the syndicated comic strip cul-de-sac by richard thompson. his latest book with captain john konrad received upstanding reviews, "fire on the horizon: the untold story of the gulf oil disaster" published by harper collins this spring. in april of 2010 we watched