i want to thank you. there was not one barnyard metaphor here which makes this panel distinguished. maybe that is because the only thing all six proposed is to cut farm subsidies. so please stay in your seat and we would get a benediction from pete peterson and thank you for your attention. [applause] >> welcome to c-span2's booktv. every weekend we bring you 48 hours of books on history, biography and public affairs by nonfiction authors.

>> and now holly tucker provides an account of the first blood transfusions, which took place in france in 1667, and the fallout from those experiments. >> we are going to get started very shortly. hollywood at her computer plug-in and i will do the introduction while she is doing that. i'd like to welcome you to the national museum of health and medicines first side café. we call it the medical museum café and we were thrilled to do this. this is one of our outreach programs that we are doing serving in conjunction with the opening of a new building. so if you are from silver spring, i think we have a lot of people who are from this area or close by neighbors. our museum is going to be opening up any new facility in maryland this fall. we are currently located at

walter reed medical center, and the medical center will be closing now through september. and so in that time period we are going to pack up and move all of our collection to a new location in silver spring. if your family with the seminary, we'll be right across the street from the. you'll be able to visit us there this fall. in the meantime we are doing some things in the community to make sure that our audiences and even new folks, new neighbors will get to know us and become for me with this and want to participate in programs. we hope the science café will be something that you will enjoy coming back to when the topic is of interest to you. we will do this either on a monthly basis or a bimonthly basis. if you're interested in this, do sign our great at the back of the room. is a clipboard. you can give us your e-mail address and we can let you know about upcoming programs and activities. please do so and feel free to

smack. writers are here with book sales. i would love for you to enjoy the. i'd like to introduce you to our speaker, and she can take her time and get ready. but this is holly tucker, and holly major -- she went on to on her ph.d at the university of wisconsin-madison. currently she's a professor of both french and the history of medicine at vanderbilt university. she teaches courses on history of art and medicine, medicine and literature as most of the courses on early literature and culture. i was first introduced to holly tucker i feel like i know her. this is her first time eating. by subscribing to her blog. i've been a fan for quite a while and if you don't know about that, i would encourage you to google it. you'll come first thing a. but it's an interesting blog. they call it a community are

curious minds who love history. it's odd stories and good reads. it started out as an area where she and her students could committee and now it's grown. a lot of scholars and writers are sending books to her and her students were given. so i was find out about a lot of very interesting history of medicine booktalk it's -- book topics. our encourage you to take a look. i was thrilled when i saw that hollywood is releasing her own new book, she talked about and i said we've got cover for the science café for the medical museum. she's our very first speaker for the café con and this is a type of very casual conversation. she knows that but i want you to know that. if you have questions feel free to interact. if you have comments i hope you make them. her book is interesting because it is history of medicine but it also brings that current topics in things i think we are all concerned about. i hope you'll enjoy hearing from holly. are you ready?

we've got a plug-in. let's do it. welcome, holly. [applause] >> so as a plug-in i can tell you, as i left arlington about two and half hours ago, i checked on my ipad and -- and the ipad -- ice directions. it said if i walk from arlington to hear it would take me 12 hours. and i think i really should have taken that. as i sat in the parking lot of all of your various highways, so thank you all for being so kind and patient as i was sitting on the interstate. as we get set up, i do want to

talk to you a little bit about the origins of this book, because it's been a fascinating experience for me. i started it about five years ago, and it started because i was planning for a class. i teach, as you were i teach at vanderbilt university where i had the opportunity to teach a whole friday of classes. one of my favorite classes is a course on the history of medicine from aristotle to the enlightenment. and one of the lectures 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. i was looking around what i need to tell the students and is looking for some interesting stories. i stumbled on a reference to blood transfusions. that was something i'd heard about and i thought this is very interesting. it's incredibly odd. and so i started to look around

and i discovered that they were transducing animals to animals in the 16 '50s. i'm sorry, 1560s. then they move from animals to humans and they were using animals as donors. so that's when i started to look at come and that i uncovered the fact that as they were doing this, they really find a lot of people. college of blood transfusion as you can imagine, hundreds of years before the discovery of blood types in 1900, 1901, long before the discovery of anesthesia and antisepsis in the 19th century, they were transducing humans with animal blood. it became even otter -- just ignore that on the screen. it became even odder when i realized it started quickly and it just as quickly after they

had been a failed institution in france. for transfusions was called on murder charges. there was a court case, and that's a court case it was determined that blood transfusion would be outlawed in france. and then it was later in did in france, england, and italy which were the hot spots in the 17th century for blood transfusion. so that's where i began this. for as odd as it seems one of the things that was interesting to me passionate can we adjust the slide? would you mind? page down maybe. spent it's not recognizing this. >> that's okay. i can do this without the illustrations just as well. was interesting to me is that --

do we have any physicians your? can you imagine doing modern medicine without transfusions, without the benefits of transfusions? there is such a thing as bloodless surgery. is also always using the patient's own blood during emergency surgery, during, surgery of course. but for the most part want to talk to physicians and health care professionals, it is really hard to imagine modern medicine without the benefits of blood transfusion. interestingly enough, the whole idea of blood transfusion in the 17th century was something that was radical because they have spent centuries, millennia in fact, imagining all of the different ways that they could take blood out of the body. that's the first thing you think, right? when you think about early medicine you think of leeches, and you think of lances and you think of blood bowls, right?

why is that? why is it the first thing that we imagine in early medicine is bloodletting? it comes down to a very simple but permeating notion of how the body worked from the fifth century b.c.e., of socrates second century a cd, the body was thought to be based on the bouts of what are called humors. those were essentially fluids in the body. the four were blood, phlegm, black bile and what they called jell-o while. and so when your body was imbalance goes for fluids were in a happy state of equilibrium. and you are healthy, 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 okay to why that is in a moment.

or the fastest way that you could do it would be essentially -- don't worry about it. we would just skip the slides. the fastest way you could adjust the bodies help with the two remove the offending humors. so that was the first case of action. when i get sick i reach for example, ibuprofen have 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 for a barbara surgeon, the same person who did you shave would also be the one who would do your bloodletting or a major surgery as well. now, imagine putting bloody was quite radical. another thing is that blood was produced again through the humors. it was thought that blood was produced to the act of eating. so you would eat something. you a digestive. it would become 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, that's how it got its heat. they did know yet about the relationship of breeding and aaron oxygenating -- party oxygen into your blood. so to briefing you are stoking the fires. agree that you essentially pulling off the heat. right? so to think. we were getting used to pulling blood out. we're also understand that blood was something that was definitely produce and digestive systems. something very important happened in the 16th at that was the blood regulation at that price with william harvey. william harvey started to wonder not just about the basis of the few moral way of understand the body. he also start to wonder is this possible at all of his blood in the body is produced by the digestive system. that got people thinking and doing experiments, both with

cadavers and then live in the bodies. harvey start to test this notion and he said personal intended to what these valves are. what do these outs in the veins do. we don't know yet about blood circulating there it was thought either they were reinforced the veins or it kept all of the fluid, all of the humors from going down into the feed. so the operator something -- he started by would what these vowels were. then he performed sections primary first on small animals like rabbits but their hearts were beating so fast he couldn't catch it. they start to move towards slow and cold-blooded animals like snakes. and he was watching it and started -- started to get close to the idea of circulation. and then will he did was he did a dissection on the human. he cut open a human heart,

measured the amount of blood in one of the cavities, the chambers of the heart, determined that there was about two ounces of blood in one of the chambers, counted the number of parts and average human would have over 30 minutes. and then what he did was he did a simple multiplication. and he found out that the body through the system of blood making and to the fact that the heart would have to burn off all of this, he did after would have to be an obscene amount of blood produced in a short period of time. something like 540 pounds of blood would have to be produced. something short and as half an hour. and he said that there's no way that this would be possible for him to imagine. so he speculated and proposed the notion of blood circulation. from there, that set off a whole flurry of experiments in england by some people that you probably recognize.

christopher wren, right, the great architect of london. he started his career as a natural philosopher, as as they call doctors at the time. what he began to do was he began to inject animals with all different types of fluid, crazy fluids like opium and beer and wine and milk. because the idea was that harvey is wrong and blood doesn't circulate. then you put this stuff, you bypass the digestive system. you put the stuff in the veins and it would go right to the heart and don't be no immediate effect and have been a lasting effect. but he was seeing his dogs drove her to sing his dogs don't and he was seeing many dogs do. and that allowed the our natural philosopher is in england to imagine, not just in fusion, but to start saying if we can put this stuff, opium, beer, no,

wine, into the veins what would happen if we start to put other like blood? in the 1660s that idea started to move forward. and particularly a started to wonder what if we took the blood of one dog and moved into another dog? and in the 16 '60s, richard lower, a member of the royal society, began his first experiments and the dogs survived. and english were getting very, very close to the whole idea, if this is working and dogs, maybe what we can start doing is an imagining transfusion in humans. something happened in between. great fire of london, played, so as excited as the english were about doing these transfusion extremist, 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 fire. they were building mighty,

mighty palaces like oversize deer but -- like oversize. the french catholic think that the whole idea of circulation is disgusting. sacrilege even to the fact that sacrilege and innocence that everything is to be known about the body is indeed already known. galen and hippocrates had entirely right. so, they're hearing that the english are doing this experiment. they don't want to be doing them. but england and france are in the thick of pretty much a space race. the whole idea of nationbuilding is developing, and for a nation to have prominent, you do the victors both on the battlefield but you also had to be victors in science. so the french in the academy, french academy of science, they start to do these experiments hopefully to determine that the

english are wrong. and their experiments didn't work. and it took me a while to figure out how is this that the english had such great success in the 16 '60s, and the french did not. and you're all thinking, too, how is it they can be doing this with animals because we know that animals have blood ties, they have more blood types than human, and they don't know anything about anesthesia. and we think about incentives are blood type. it turns out there are three variables. the first is how fast the blood goes in. the second is how much and third whether there's 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 really recommend terry, no surprise, really rudimentary systems for transfusion. the first transfusion among animals were done with goose quills.

they would gently insert the goose quill that have been wrapped around other goose quills with twine and then connect the dogs that way. we know that the blood did not move very fast. and many times clotted the minute it went through the quills. but it still didn't answer my question. why did the french experiment fail? it turns out after i spent a lot of time working in the archives of the academy of sciences, and looking at the manuscript minutes of these secret experiments, is that they were using their dogs. so many of the experiment the dogs have had the third grade had already had previous exposure. the french determined that their experiments failed, that the english were of course lawyers. and they're 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 ended a competing school, the university is a competing school in a 17th century to the illustrious paris faculty of medicine and the university of paris. and that school is highly traditional. and if you want to practice in pairs, you actually have to get your degree at the faculty of medicine. you also have to be of a noble class, well bred, and jeff have lots of connection. visit southern frenchmen of low birth, his father was an artisan, trained in the rival school, but that didn't stop him wanting to go up to paris to make a name for himself. what's these way to make a name for yourself? for any of you who have children, you know that the children, to get your tickets they do exactly what you don't want them to do. that's what he did come is he decided he wanted to in rage the

terrorist elite and to put his name on the map by performing transfusion experiments. so he begins his first transit and experiment with dogs just like the english on the left bank and the latin quarter of paris. and if any of you have visited paris or will visit paris, i want you to imagine it because i stood there many times in my research and matching where these transfusions were taking place. if you're facing a me up notre dame to back and looking at the fountain and you can see the banks and the are these very large buildings facing. jean baptiste, his apartment was in one of those buildings at their nearby. he does these experience in his home. he was nearly married. we have no idea what his wife thought about these. in with some success he moved his experiment public and began doing them on the banks. and that's the way you get attention. you make a big announcement. hear ye, hear ye, on sunday at

2 p.m., i will transfuse a mangy dog with a healthy dog. come one, come all. you can only imagine that the french elite who again, against transfusion, against circulation what they had to say about it, they were enraged. so what's very interesting is jean-baptiste denys, with his great success with the dogs decide that the most important way that he's going to make a name for himself is he's going to try to scoop the english. the english are this close to performing their own human transfusion. so jean-baptiste denys says i'm going to beat them into a. so he performs his first transfusion experiment in 1667 on a young feverish void. we don't know how he got the patient. it's very likely he paid the pair. he transfuse his convoy with calf's blood and the voip survive. and that was a major criteria

for success. the second transfusion is a butcher. now, i can't be sure of this but from what i can tell, the first butcher who provided the sheep for the young boy was a very colorful me. after the bush infusion he said are you going to let that lamb go to waste? let me take a. toby a great dinner for my wife and me. second transfusion is a butcher was equally sort of sure, he's not sick. pages offers himself up for pay. he is transfuse with sheep's blood and survives. my favorite story for all this is a veteran the transfusion, the transfusion is is walking down the streets of paris, looks into a tavern and he sees his butcher. he's going to go tell the butcher off. he walks it. approach is drunk because he's used all of his earnings to buy beer.

and then suddenly his rabbi whole bunch of other workers who seek transfuse me, transfuse me. so transfusions lease and says, pretty good. i'm going to transfuse somebody else. this is where it gets very interesting. and jean-baptiste denys reaches for the most famous man in paris in the 1660s. a man named antoine mauroy who is known in town for running around -- mentally ill. running around naked, screaming, setting homes on fires, the most illustrious letter rarity, the hosting set up by the is also beloved because he had been a ballet to a very, very influential lady in this area. he is at once laughingstock, feared and beloved. and jean-baptiste denys believes if he can transfuse antoine

mauroy successfully he will have been successful. they pluck jean-baptiste denys he and his benefactor because it cost a lot of money to do research as we all know. he has a very wealthy benefactor. they pluck antoine mauroy off the streets of paris, tie him to a chair and transfuse him with calf's blood. this is the first time to really see clear evidence of a reaction. antoine mauroy starts to scream. his arm is turning red and getting very hot. he starts to vomit. his head is spinning. they decide to stop, we're going to stop this transfusion right away. the shuffle the man off into a service quarters, and he is calm her and happier, and he seems geared actually of his madness. second transfusion goes equally well. again with calf's blood. in fact, the man's wife comes

and finds her husband who has been running on the streets, and is the world. she says to the transfusion is, what did you do to my husband? in this full of he would be beating me, now he is telling me he loves me and he is so very calm. it's very likely that man was just very sick and didn't have a lot of energy in him. the man and his wife go off into the home, off into the village, jean-baptiste denys a while later gets a knock on the door sank my husband is at it again. you need to transfuse him now. jean-baptiste denys refuses and then can't help himself. goes out and begins a transfusion, not long after the man is dead. denys is accused of murder. and it looks that he's going to actually be held on murder charges. what's very interesting in this is that there's a court case.

denys ackley said i didn't do it. the widow is suggesting to me that there's something amiss. and there was, something mighty amiss. is that in the court case they interviewed the widow, they interviewed neighbors, they interview just about anybody you could think about. and it was determined that a murder that happened. it was not from the animal's blood that may or may not have flooded antoine mauroy's veins, but he had been poisoned by arsenic. and on top of it, in the court records it said that three physicians, unnamed physicians, were responsible. than the rest of the court case said there will be no further transfusions without the express approval of the paris faculty of medicine. that's not going to happen for the reason i told you, that they were against the transfusion to begin with. as i start to look through this i realize that most of the historical approaches to this

odd case were, thank goodness blood transfusion didn't continue because it was a mess, it was dangerous, it was horrible. i know, as someone who works in history of medicine, i know that they were doing all types of surgeries that i see some queasy factor out there, too. they were taking bladder stones, cutting into the air into the perineum so deep that you could reach her entire hand into somebody's body, or worse they were doing he now extractions, right? of bladder stones. no anesthesia, no interceptors. they were also doing more and more sustained sections as well. those were done much more frequent than any of these few blood transfusions so that got me started, how in the world could not just be the only answer, is that blood transfusion stopped, started and thank goodness finish. and so i start to figure who these three guys were, these unnamed physicians who were involved in the arsenic poisoning. and they were hard to find.

let me to you. so i couldn't find him at first i thought to myself, why would somebody be against blood transfusion? it turns out as you start to look at all of the anti-blood transfusion, of which are many, there's a great fear that by many animal blood into human veins, is that somehow or another you were going to alter what it meant to be human. what humans start to bark? with dogs start to reason? that could be fasting for early 17th century, 18th century people. wide? because they have been traveling all of these new world travels, they have been going and discovering lands unknown, people's unknown. i can only imagine what the first european might have thought about seeing a giraffe for the first time. all of these travelers coming back with stories of sea monsters, of, yes, they're coming back with stories of entire villages of people who

looked like dogs. these dog headed men. fascinating stories that were fascinating and frightening. now science have the ability to engineer it seemed monsters. some very conservative thinkers. that was too frightening. .com right? it makes a lot of sense that they would reach for animals. the first is that animals -- i have a dog. i've never seen my docs vote. my dog barks loud but i don't think he is swearing at me. they don't drink, smoke, swagger and also earlier medical practices used animal flesh influence on a regular basis, right? is that if you were sick on issue getting over a cold and

you were passionate what you do is you would eat a raw state. you might even sprinkle some dried stack testicles on there. sorry, but these are common recipes to enhance one's health. the third recent offers is they are pure. second reason is it was traditional to use nutrition to offset these humorous. the third is that rené descartes, the blosser, the great french philosopher, a man of course we also sit with i think therefore i am, right? he also had another radical way of understanding the human body. that was the mind-body dualism. rené descartes speculated that the animals and humans were identical in the fact that they were machines. and were ineffective the scientific revolutio revolutione described the science of hydraulics is just now starting

to get picnic reading barometers. everything you can imagine is now up for grabs and its highly mechanical mechanical. highly mechanistic. rené descartes things that animals and he was identical. they function as police and pipes, right? the only difference is that humans can speak, they can recent and they have a soul. and descartes speculates that that sal is not in the body. the soul is not reported. that makes a lot of sense but this is, harvey in the 16th, descartes is in the 1630. the mind-body dualism begins in a 1630. we start move towards in fusion experiments in the 1650s and then we're in the thick of transfusion experience in the 1660s. so if descartes is right, taking animal blood, pure animal blood and moving it into human body, is something like changing the oil of your car. no big deal.

but what if descartes is wrong? what if descartes is wrong? what if as had long been speculated and discussed and also written down biblically, what if the soul is actually in the blood? and that was a very frightening to many conservatives physicians. so frightening that they would resort to murdering a transfusion is patient and setting him up, right, on these charges. now, it worked. blood transfusion was banned. and it would not be started up for another 150 years. i will get you that in just one minute. in my research it was -- so i could figure out why somebody would want to do this. who were they? and i researched it and researched it. it is a rough life. i had to go to paris and rome and london, and i even made an argument to go to dublin because there was a great collection of

a huguenot of protestant french doctors collection in dublin at a specialized library. so i did a lot of travel for the. each time i thought i was getting closer and closer to the -- well, i guess the men who tried to murder the transfusion patient. and i worked on for three years and begin to despair because i thought that there is just no way, i can't find it. every time i thought i could find the person i couldn't pin it on the. in the end, these guys are dead but there's a responsibility that you have. i make using long dead people of murder, but that's still huge accusation. so i almost started to give up because i had the motive, i had i thought some of the people who might have been involved but i just couldn't find them for sure who did it. and so i decide to give up on the project because i couldn't figure who did it and then goes many years of my life. so what if i ate a lot of great french food and how did -- had a lot of great french wine.

so i was at my study in nashville that is going to put away my nose and i'm inventorying my because i'm very meticulous about research. and i spent a couple of weeks thank type in what the document is, number you can put it in the carton. i'm getting ready to put this project would. for anybody who is an research, you know that the last few days of being anybody and archiver is hairy because this only things you want to look at, manuscripts and books, that you know you can get anywhere else but you only have a couple more days so you end up spending a fortune, a fortune in reproduction costs. i see people nodding yeah. and in what happens in these libraries, it can take forever to get them. six, eight weeks, two months. so as a putting away my documents, i saw a stack, in fact, it was a huge envelope from a french library. what is this?

i opened up, yeah, yeah, yeah. i remember when that was. and i started flipping and i ended up coming across a letter from a lawyer in parliament which was the french equivalent of the supreme court. pretty much same i should not be writing this letter, but the transfusion is jean-baptiste denys has every reason to fear for his life. person x. and person y. should be ashamed of what they did to try to stop transfusion. i believe desperately that transfusion should be allowed to continue, and i looked at it, read it again. what, what? another couple of months going back again. going back again to france. polling is making as a good about these people whose name i had seen before in anti-transfusion is tracked looking at the letters, looking at their treatises. and it turned out that they were

sitting out in the open. once i had their names, i was saying vigilantes are rarely shied. is that the names were not known to history, but the documents were sitting there. essentially tipping off the world that they had done it and proudly so. and so the fun story, i do know about you but when i meet office on interest in history behind the scenes is after i was actually sure i've looked under every stone and i felt confident that i was able to find them, i thought this is more than i can have so i asked how can god is going to go to the ymca and work it can get some energy and i decided to call my husband. he picked up the phone and i started to cry and i said, i found them. he said our u.k.? i found them. what? what? i found the killers. what killers? what are you talking about? the transfusion kills. and he laughed and he said, you

do solve a 350 year old cold case. that's what i did. so this whole project was a wild ride, and a fascinating ride for me. one of the things that's interesting to me as you have suggested is there some a different resonance. i guess the modern residents to conclude that, to put the past in a contemporary context so that we can understand why the past is so important, now the past past can help guide us as we move into our own moment, i would say of scientific revolutions. that i knew in 2006, this is before i found the killers, that i wanted to write this book in a way that would be compelling, not just an academic audience but also to a general reader. interested in scientific revolution and interested in looking at the way that history matters in our own science. 2006 george w. bush in his state

of the union address in which he surprised actually a lot of people in the scientific community saying he was calling for prohibition of human animal hybrids. came out of the blue. and i thought that's a weird, and there was a rhetoric to it that sounded an awful lot like the record of my 17th century guys. so i spent a lot of time in the months afterward watching the cultural sphere, and i realized that many of the responses that i was hearing -- of course, bush was talking about cloning, right? human a real logical stem cell research, all of those mucky issues surrounding genomic research and the fears that we will do something to the human species. i heard in the social sphere that same type of response, this is horrible, it must be stopped. i also heard other people think, particularly my scientist

friends saying we've been doing interspecies research for a very long time, right? at different gradations, right? whether we are doing crafting of pig heart valves, whether we're doing knockout mice, mice i should have human diseases. all different types of animal human experiments, what's the big deal? then the fun part was looking at all of the fun people on the internet doing these cool wacky things and walking dogs and talking cuts these are creepy but pigs nursing human babies. those types of things. and i realized those types of illustrations that i was saying were identical to the same types of interspecies monsters that we saw in the 17th century. so when i started to write this book i wanted to ask three important question. i wanted to use the pastor asked

important questions about where we are now. the first is should society limit our science? because that relationship between science and society is so precarious. the second question, if so, at what cost? i can't help but to think, would transfusion actually have continued and would we have had transfusion much earlier? could even determine blood type much earlier. had the societal responses to transfusion not stopped it in its tracks. because experiment in 1900 was very simple. basically took a look at the blood from some call it, a little bit of blood from another colleague, but a collector laid with blood be and he ended up being able to do some grass and he determined the first initial blood type. it wasn't a hard experiment a did need lots tools.

that's a moot question. history can answer this question. would lives have been saved? i don't know. would lives have been lost? probably. but the third question, what should the relationship of science and society be? should society put limits on its side, if so, what price? the 30th the most fascinating. is if we are looking hundred 50 years later at how initial cultural responses work to blood transfusion, something that is complicated but in most circles unproblematic, right? how will history, how will people 50 years, 100 years, 150 years be looking at us as we are trying to come to terms with our stance towards things like human ideological research. cloning, these may seem to be very different technology, this will be the end, am i closing

point, in the end those technologies are not all that different in the philosophical realm. each one gets at the question of what does it mean to be human? what does it mean that to be human? and in the case of human embryo logical stem cell research when does the idea of humanists began? in all of those questions, when we look at the history of medicine, and look at the way society has tried to come to terms with different modes of scientific innovation and revolution, those are lasting questions that will continue long after. i would love to hear your questions. [applause] >> can i ask three unrelated questions? when people say -- [inaudible] are they talking about yellow bile? was that the humor of the

spleen? was about the yellow bile and deliver black bile? >> they weren't always associated specifically with oregon's. flynn -- in fact, blood itself contain all of the humorous. and i think i will bypass the question because i'm reluctant to do that because i don't have a good -- i'm not sure how to add to that site don't want to be wrong about it. i'll give my card and look it up and tell you for sure. >> that goes back to speak it has to be related because in the humors, melancholy, melancholy, which is an early term for depression is associated with having too much black bile, right? if someone is choleric come is that detention have your leaning towards one humor over the other. so very shortly that expression

related to humors but i want to take a little bit more exactly what was first used. >> lincoln against initially referred to the hypo, the hypo being hypochondria, referring to liver and access black bile and melancholy. was that the origin of that term? >> in lincoln's time, of course. there is still, plenty of humors continues well into the 19th century. in fact, george washington as we know was blood let. very possibly historians of science would say was a really his throat infection, the infection are the fact that he was just blood let like crazy? and another interesting thing, ask an open of the book with this is that after washington died in 1799, there was speculation the day 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. object. >> they're going to try to warm him up, wanted up to try to get the blood and an entrance use him with animal's blood. so this is not something that is just located in the 17th century. and and send of the discovery of blood circulation does it mean that is it that you moral theory is gone by any means. bloodletting will continue well into the 17th century, and it again, especially with humors and as you're suggesting associate with a whole range of describing the human body and also describing human character. >> i could keep on going, but i will limit myself to one more question. then i will turn it over to you. what is your take on the origin, you mentioned cistern section so i'm going to -- again. what is your take on the origin of that term?

was that julius caesar was actually born that way? his mother's belly and uterus was cut open and he was extracted that way? or is there some other -- i for god's sake controversial term. and what are your thoughts on the origin of that term? >> i can tell you it is thought, since antiquity got is that that was indeed the way that he was born to do we know for sure? know. does that mean necessary sections were consistently performed from that time forward? no. the first c-sections were performed in the very early 17th century, or claim to have been performed by a doctor in france, a whole treatise about how wonderful he was at performed the same sections to such a great degree that one of his patients had the operation five times and would be very happy to show him, show the world her scars it i doubt that

he performed those. but beginning in the early 17th century, the discussions about sustained sections began. and do we start to see by mid-17th century not frequently but sometimes come and we're seeing it not as a regular procedure that we see again controversial now, but by the 18th century their performed on a semi regular basis. it is interesting to me we go from caesar envoy to the 17th century, to my knowledge we don't have really documented evidence that it was performed at all with consistency. [inaudible] >> absolutely. >> louis xiv wanted to do, be the next caesar? >> the question is, since we have the roman antiquity reference, is that now part and parcel of 17th century life, to address, yes, absolutely.

if you look at the literature in 17th century, we are deep in the neoclassical period in which they are recuperating texts, euripides, and moving them into their theaters. and if you take a look at the architecture of the time as well, neoclassical model, classical models of architecture, dominated. now to what degree would that have something to do with cesarean section, doubtful but that also gets to a good idea why the french were so beholden, right, the model of antiquity in their medicine. it does models of antiquity actually dominated all, permeated much of the french 17th century life. not so much in england, right? the english had a more of a tradition, i would even say, of pushing back against tradition but as the french are coming out of all of the realistic wars come of the late 16th century, there's a tradition in catholic france of pushing against those

who would push against tradition. i think that's an interesting question actually of classical models of france and the relationship between body and culture. >> there's this view of the blood being the sole with their propensity for bloodletting. what did you do with the blood to contain the the sole questioner spilling into the garbage? >> that's a really good question. i don't know how to answer that. i really do not know how to answer that. i will have to think on it. >> i see a little hand back there. >> what was it like to find a killer? >> what was it like? it was exciting. it was really scary to because as i mentioned, i was accusing people of one of the worst

things that you could do, right? i can take a old are you? seven? my daughter was seven when i started this book and she is now about 10 and a half. when i started really writing this book, and she was very interested in this. gilad thing issue would go into my study at home and i would have all of these dissection manuals, because they did all types of gross things. they would put leeches on people, right? they would do a school drilling. and my daughter would walk into my study and don't money, i'm so glad you're a writer and i'm so proud of you but passionate would you feel the same way when you saw all these gross things? >> may be. [laughter] >> may be. >> i wanted to get across any -- kind of confusion you know to replace kind of someone when they bleed, they just wait and

don't stop? i mean, i feel like hemophilia kind of has a role in just history of medicine and kind of history in general. did you come across any cases? >> interestingly in the early transfusion in 17th century that does not seem to be the case. it was more to one, pure and. >> him in the case of the butcher. or in the case of the mental element who thought that mental illness, again, going to the humors, mental illness was result of overly heated blood so the blood would get too hot, vapors would rise to the brain and what trouble the minute it was thought it would be more pure cooling animal blood into mentally ill people. in fact, there was another transfusion in england at about the same time as the frenchman, that they be able to calm him down. it was never the idea that they

could replace blood. early speculation was that perhaps what you could do it is you could feed intravenously people who were not able to eat, but taking a bag of -- taking blood confusion in the 19th century, and in 1818, i got in london was an obstetrics doctor and he was saying his patients bleed outcome hemorrhaging after childbirth. and was lamenting, something has to be done. and he wondered, would it be possible than 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 member's blood. they were not highly successful, but that's what's very interesting is that after that, people started wondering, could we then start doing transfusion. and over the next 80 or 90 years it was fastened to all the different experiments they started to do. they're trying to do with the

fact that blood to my delight quickly out of the body so you're taking facts of blood and taking things like, you know, things that make cakes with, be to come to see if they could beat it in to grab the stuff on the. they're putting all types of chemicals into the blood to see if they get from collecting and sort of fast forward, by 1900 with the discovery of blood types. by 1914, they discovered sodium citrate, which keeps the blood from collecting. and that allows a very important innovation is a constructive and blood remotely because before what they would have to do is they would -- that have to be patient hooked up to patients in utah of the latter type of device. for some physicians were actually stitching veins and

arteries together to do the transfusion from donor to recipient, to be able to do this, in 1914, right, we're right in the world wars. that allows particularly spain for them and the the spanish civil war to be able to collect blood, they know about blood types, put it in class flasks and be able to deliver to the battlefield. and from there there is the thought of grading the first blood banks. first in leningrad in the -- so that's an excellent question that interests and my thought is 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 of blood transfusions. >> one of the things i think, we would look back at historical health practices, we can see

that they were resistant to saying some paradigm shift. i mean, are we really any different? and to what kind of things did you see in your research that i don't really know the question i'm asking, but it seems like people no -- did they know that they didn't know? or did they think they knew i guess is the question? >> i really like that question a lot. and it is really one that is hard to articulate. first, it's tempting as someone who works in history is to want to read a forward narrative and say oh, look how much they didn't know. we are the answer. or, look at close they were if only they knew, but we found the answer. let's say that what is important in every period is an excess of humility is to realize that just

as they were trying to master the secrets of nature and the body, they recognize just how hard that was. but that didn't keep them from plowing forward. just as we're still doing the same thing. we have to be humble. that's that third question is how is history going to be judging us. we have to be humble and think about there so much more that we don't know than we do know. and by touching a little bit on that question? okay. it's hard to articulate, isn't it? yeah, yeah. [inaudible] >> first i want is a great talker i love the fact that your pictures didn't work because you tell such a provocative story. that was great, even though classic images and harvey and all are a joy as well. but i love the way this works. but i think my question is sort of getting at the popularization

of science, or maybe science and medicine and you touched on it kind of throughout your talk, and am wondering about this idea of sort of public exhibition of transfusion or i'm thinking of other things like, that were done similarly with displays of botany for galvani and electricity. and things of that. and sort of sort of opening sort of the windows to digital public or the salon going public or things like that in france, or you could think about that historically a bit, or maybe even today, and how we sort of consume this and come to terms with the medical development. >> that's precisely one of the things i'm interested in.