Blood work, p.21
Blood Work, page 21
Still, the otherwise little-known Basril felt compelled to speak out. He explained that his reasons for publicly revealing the identities of those behind the plot against Denis were not motivated by a wish to argue either for or against the procedure. Instead he believed “with all of his heart in the truth”—and it was only through experimentation that such truths could be found. “In effect,” Basril explained, “because transfusion is the subject of so many disputes and animosities, it seems to me that, to proceed sincerely, those who have declared themselves against it would do better to perform experiments and to examine it in good faith.”
Details of Basril’s life and status at parliament have been lost to history, but his words have not. In his revelatory letter Basril spoke calmly but firmly about the “indignation” that he felt toward those who “by ignorance or jealousy” worked to put an end to those experiments. Bristling over what he called the “cabal” against Denis, he named two men—Guillaume Lamy and Henri-Martin de la Martinière—for their involvement in the “secret intrigues” and “cowardly plots.”
While Martinière and Lamy’s paths had not likely crossed before Denis’ experiments, the two men shared a firm bond from the moment the transfusionist began his animal-to-human experiments. A footman had presented Martinière with a letter by Lamy denouncing transfusion immediately following a vivid dream about a philosopher who was transformed into a cow. And from that moment, Martinière shared a “friendship [with Lamy] that I have imprinted in my soul.”3
There is little doubt that Lamy had been working assiduously to turn the opinion of the Paris Faculty of Medicine against Denis and transfusion. Barely days after Mauroy’s death, on February 16, 1668, Lamy wrote another letter to the influential physician René Moreau. His tone was reflective and measured, but Lamy could not resist gloating over Denis’ now-uncertain future. “I would like to think,” he crowed, “that…[Denis] saw in his imagination his reputation soaring and that all knowledgeable men would be praising his glory and miracles. But the human condition is subject to prompt change and marvelous vicissitudes. The miserable adventure of the madman’s death will be enough to overturn all of his beautiful imaginations and to ruin entirely his high hopes.”4
Lamy acknowledged in his letter that he and Denis had traded angry words in public. The University of Paris faculty member also acknowledged that there were lingering doubts among those in the medical world about whether he might have attempted to seek “vengeance against Monsieur Denis for having treated me so outrageously.”5 In the wake of such accusations Lamy resolved publicly to abstain from any public discussion about the matter from this point forward. “I do not wish to debate this issue further with him. I will not write of it again, not out of fear of accusations but for my good rest and also because I think that I have said enough.”6 Lamy kept his resolution until his death, it appears. And in the absence of other documents that would support Basril’s accusations, it is difficult to say with confidence what Lamy’s precise role may have been in assisting Perrine Mauroy in her dark deeds.
But there is no lack of historical evidence in the case of Martinière. While Lamy remained quiet, Martinière spilled copious amounts of ink proclaiming his innocence. But a paper trail followed him, and it implicated him directly in the death of Mauroy. As a devout Catholic, Martinière made no secret of his belief that transfusion corrupted both bodies and souls. A man with a decidedly colorful history, Martinière agreed wholeheartedly with the Paris Faculty of Medicine and the Academy of Sciences about the pernicious effects of transfusion. However, he was furious that Denis’ research had been allowed to continue seemingly unchecked in the days and weeks preceding the Mauroy transfusions. Verbose and prone to passionate outbursts. Martinière fired off countless letters to any person he thought might listen.
For as powerful as Louis XIV had become, the pirate-turned-physician felt that Denis needed to answer to still another power—one even more commanding than the Sun King himself: God. Any notion of an immaterial soul, he argued venomously, was “ridiculous” and sacrilegious.7 He shared this view with Lamy. Similarly rejecting Cartesian mind-body dualism, Lamy believed, like most of his colleagues at the university, that the human soul was corporeal.8 Martinière went one step further, arguing that blood was the precious fluid that created a “harmonious link between the soul and the body.”9 For Martinière both transfusionists and Protestant alchemists were cut from the same cloth. Each tried to bring about unholy transformations. Alchemists transmuted metals. Transfusionists transmuted souls.10
Like the fears of hybrid monsters that Martinière nursed since his pirate days, so too did his scorn of alchemists come from personal experience. After his release from captivity on the corsair ships, he made his way through Portugal and Italy before ending his travels in France. Along the way he sojourned for two months in Milan, where he earned his keep by working for an alchemist. His job was suffocatingly hot and backbreaking. As a souffleur (puffer) he kept the fires burning as his master tried desperately to unlock chemical arcana. He watched his master’s greedy quest for wealth, power, and eternal life—and then he snapped. “After having puffed three days and three nights with someone without accomplishing anything but wasting our time, our fuel and all of our lead, I took a bat,” he explained, “and smashed all of the furnaces, kettles, alembics, and cauldrons. I swore that I would never again pursue the mad search for the so-called Philosopher’s Stone.”11
Martinière wrote a series of similar battle cries against transfusion between Mauroy’s first two procedures in December 1667 and the fatal third one during the week of February 15, 1668. He described dreams in which he saw himself taking on with courageous pride and violence the monsters created by transfusionist transformations. In one he claimed to have seen a Chimera, a monstrous beast with “the head of lion, the tail of a dragon, the stomach of a goat” along with other composite parts of beasts and humans. The monster “infected all parts of the earth where it roamed spewing pernicious venom.” Transfusion, he explained, was Satan’s work and solely responsible for resurrecting this and mythical monsters. “I believed,” Martinière wrote, “that time had buried [them]…but Satan, enemy of the human race, on the pretext of charity, reignited them through vain hopes of [transfusion’s] usefulness.”12
FIGURE 22: An alchemical laboratory. Young men were frequently employed as “puffers” (souffleurs), responsible for keeping fires burning underneath the alchemist’s experiments. Phillip Galle (sixteenth century).
In the dream Martinière readied his weapons to strike the beast. As he did, “a quantity of learned men” surrounded him. They menaced him and threatened him until he ran away in surrender, fearful for his life. Moments later, the physician related, Athena herself—goddess of wisdom—arrived. Holding a large javelin in her hand, she impaled the monster and then beat it violently with a club until it died. Reflecting on his dream, Martinière vowed never to run away from his responsibilities again. He would stare the transfusionists straight in the eye. And then he would destroy them.
Over the nights that followed Martinière claimed to have been visited again by another mythic personage. This time he had a vision of Medea, the murderous transfusionist of antiquity. “I saw in the sky a woman in a chariot,” Martinière claimed. “She looked at me with angry eyes and hissed, ‘If my charms are not strong enough to convince you to give up your resolve to abolish transfusion, I will rip you apart [as I did] my brother and the children that I had with Jason.’” The physician turned indignantly to the sorceress. “It is you, execrable Medea, deadly witch!” he cried bitterly. “Despite your threats, I promise you that I will never give up on my dedication to the public good. I will do everything in my power to expose your dark plans to the world.”13
Taking a page from Medea’s own playbook, Martinière made good on his promise. And so convinced was he of the righteousness of his cause that he made little attempt to hide many clues that implicated him in Mauroy’s murder. In a treatise he wrote on April 4, 1668, not long after the Châtelet hearing, Martinière confessed that he met at least once—when or where he does not say—with Perrine to discuss the transfusions that had been performed on her husband. He also confirmed that he encouraged Perrine to consider filing a formal complaint against Denis, although he wisely neglected to mention whether any money had changed hands in the process.14 And tellingly, in the mass of documents related to Denis’ work, it is Martinière alone who provided the name of the apothecary, a Monsieur Claquenelle, from whom Perrine reportedly bought the ingredients for the powders she administered to her husband.
Thus it seems highly likely that Martinière counseled Perrine on what poison to use, how to acquire it, and how it should be administered. To be sure, Martinière was no stranger to the effects of various herbs and their poisonous potential. His first task in every port of call, as the sole doctor on a pirate ship, had been to seek out apothecaries. He had also published a lengthy Treatise on Antidotes just a few years earlier—and to know antidotes one needed to know poisons. The bulk of Martinière’s treatise focused on the complex preparation of “mithridate,” which many herbalists and apothecaries claimed to be something of a magical cure-all. Martinière’s own recipe for mithridate contained more than forty different substances—including rose leaves, myrrh, and powdered extract of beaver tail glands.
The mixture was named after the second-century BC Greek king Mithradates VI, who was rumored to have hardened himself against poison by means of a mysterious and virtuous potion that the king researched throughout his reign. This antidote—and his obsession—earned him the title “poison king.” He was infamous for testing his poisons, as well as his antidotes, on prisoners. At elaborate banquets prisoners condemned to death would be publicly fed poison-laced food or shot with poison-dipped arrows while the king narrated their symptoms to the crowd. When death was near, the prisoners were dragged away and used as guinea pigs to test the king’s antidotes.15 Martinière likewise observed without hesitation that poison, death, and doctoring went hand in hand. “I know,” he argued, “that homicide by doctors is allowed.”16
Martinière’s writings continued to take on a dark and menacing tone. Martinière depicted himself as a noble warrior and left no doubt that his next target would be Denis himself. “Allow me to tell you, Sir,” Martinière wrote directly to Denis, “that Satan reveals himself through your work.”17 He made it clear that he viewed himself as “a spirit that will not fail to arrive at our goals, by giving [the transfusionist] a fatal strike.”18 Mauroy’s death, he explained, would be only a prelude to Denis’ own: “We read in the book of Judges that the King of the Canaanites, who killed several kings by cutting their hands and feet off, was sentenced to die of their same death. And it is written in the New Testament that whoever kills by the sword, dies by the sword. Be careful,” Martinière warned Denis, “that…you are not yourself visited by the Furies, who as principal guardians of the law, will perform endless transfusions on you with the help of their little minions from the underworld. Or [perhaps you should be] careful that you’re not transmutated into a calf [as] Lucian was in the Golden Ass, sentenced to hard labor and beaten with sticks.”19 Martinière’s ravings were not, it would appear, just the innocuous outbursts of a man who believed deeply in the righteousness of his claims. As the lawyer Basril noted, “Monsieur Denis is very prudent to keep silent.”
Martinière was outraged when he became aware of Basril’s letter naming him in the plot. “This,” he wrote indignantly, “is my reward for having worked to suffocate the transfusionist monster in his cradle”—a phrase that Lamy, coincidentally, used as well in one of his own letters.20 The angry doctor quickly went on the defensive and, in doing so, spilled yet more ink as he sent handfuls of letters far and wide in order to proclaim his innocence. Among these letters was one addressed directly to Mathieu Molé, the man assigned to judge Denis’ appeal in parliament. Martinière urged the judge to take a stance against transfusion’s unholy corruption of the human race. “Knowing that you are the Judge of the Transfusors,” wrote Martinière, “I have taken the liberty to put my hand to plume in order to show you the horror of the operation, which is directly to the contrary and opposite of God’s wishes, because it destroys His living images.”21
Martinière continued his writing campaign at the highest of political echelons—going so far as to address Prime Minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert himself. “Knowing that you do not approve of this so-called operation of blood transfusion,” Martinière declared, “I know that you will not be surprised to hear that there are some men who are so feeble minded to believe that it is an effective remedy against a variety of illnesses.”22 Martinière warned Colbert of the bloodbaths that were sure to happen should the transfusionist be allowed to continue his work. “Denis,” Martinière explained, “is hoping that the doctors of the Faculty of Medicine will allow the deaths of seven to eight million men before they bring themselves to condemn the procedure.”23 Martinière begged Colbert to step in and offered a suggestion for a suitable punishment for Denis: “The innovators whose inclination is to pull and push blood…should be sent to the Caribbean and sacrificed to the idols.”24
In his letter to the prime minister, Martinière reiterated his belief that his actions had been fully warranted and asked for Colbert’s help against those who would seek to punish him for his action. Placing his fate in the prime minister’s hands, he pleaded: “Your Goodness, I finish here by asking for the honor of your protection and by begging you to stop the case [against me], because I never intended to hurt anyone, I only wanted to ensure that this cruel and disgusting science would not endure.”25
There is no formal record of Colbert stepping in, yet one thing is certain: Martinière was never put on trial. And without another word Martinière disappeared. In the years following his involvement in the Denis affair, he quietly published two lengthy memoirs of his travels as a young man on the high seas. Yet not a single one of his works addressed medical issues, nor did he ever discuss transfusion again. Between the parliament ruling and his death in 1676, biographers have found only fleeting traces of Martinière in Amsterdam and Dublin.26 This leaves us to question whether there could have been a gentleman’s agreement of some kind that recognized his usefulness in putting transfusion to rest, while at the same time removing the uncontrollable and explosive Martinière from the Paris medical community.
Denis’ supporter Henri de Montmor also slipped from sight following the trial. According to Jean Chapelain, once a regular attendee of the Montmor Academy, the nobleman fell into a deep depression after 1669—the year of the parliament trial. “He was,” wrote Chapelain, “obliged to sell his title as Master of Requests [at parliament] and there was some talk that he lost his mind a bit, or even fell into suicidal despair. For eight days, they had to force him to eat to stay alive.”27 It took a visit from the archbishop of Paris to persuade Montmor to let his family and his doctors care for him. And for at least a year after the trial, “he lived only on milk and did not involve himself in any domestic matters, nor did he speak to anyone or accept visitors.” Giving up his hopes of a private academy for good, Montmor spent the next six years removed from the world in a state of disillusioned stupor.28 Meanwhile his eldest son handled all family affairs, and soon the once-legendary family was bankrupt. Montmor died in 1679.29
As for Denis, he returned to his home on the Left Bank, where he gave paid lectures to students as he had done before transfusion catapulted him into the public eye. The experience had changed him, it seemed—or at the very least had taught him to temper his ambitions. One of his first conferences after the parliament hearing focused on “judicial astrology,” or the ability to tell the future from the stars. “There is nothing so common as to see people who are infatuated with the folly of astrology, who brag about being able to predict various events that will happen in their lives,” Denis explained, with some disappointment and perhaps newfound wisdom in the wake of his losses. “Anyway, if a prediction that good things will happen does actually come true, it would be a disservice. Predictions will always keep you in a state of suspense, in a state of impatient hope, and this hope will deprive you of everything that is good and agreeable in life.”30
Yet Denis’ endeavors later in life may just prove to be one of the greatest of history’s frequent ironies. Four years after the final trial at parliament, the former transfusionist set himself on the most unlikely of research paths. Denis—the man who boldly championed transfusion against all odds—invented styptic, which is now found in medical cabinets around the world and used to stop mild bleeding.31 If he was not able to ensure his legacy by making blood flow, he would do it by making blood stop entirely. Denis died in 1704 at the age of sixty-nine.
Another one hundred and fifty years would pass before blood transfusion returned to the early-medical landscape. In late 1817, James Blundell walked briskly down the halls of the maternity ward at Guy’s Hospital in London. The twenty-six-year-old doctor had been called to the bedside of a new mother who was hemorrhaging. By the time Blundell arrived, the bleeding had stopped but the woman was pale and gravely weak from blood loss. With the angst of a newly minted physician who had not yet seen his fill of death, Blundell lamented that “her fate was decided.” He was right; the woman died two hours later.
