Terrible symbolism-based blood transfusions

[malymin]

Recently, I read a tumblr post about how it was believed that blood transfusions could cure psychosis - specifically, blood from a biblically "pure" animal, like a lamb or calf, would imbue the subject with their sweet and pure nature, thus tempering and subduing any "madness." On the occasions where this even actually worked, it was only because the psychosis in question being caused by a syphilis - which, sensitive to temperature changes, would die in the ensuing fever as the body rejected the incompatible transfused blood. For preservation purposes, I'm going to put the text of this post under a cut bellow.

In the 1700s, blood transfusion was used to treat psychosis. Oddly, sometimes it worked.

So a question for my followers: Give your best guess as to why this could have worked without looking it up.

I will answer tomorrow.

[...]

Answer: A particularly common form of psychosis occurred in the final stage of infection with syphilis. Syphilis is an uncommon bacteria in that is is extremely sensitive to temperature- so sensitive that a high fever greatly reduced or even eliminated infection with the bacteria. In fact, once quinine became available to treat malaria, which caused repeated high fevers, intentional infection with malaria was used to cure syphilis, which would then be treated with quinine. But in the 1700s, they (Europeans, at least) didn't have quinine yet.

So how did a blood transfusion treat syphilis? Well, in the 1700s, blood transfusions were not done with human blood- they were done with animal blood, usually lamb or calf blood. Since biblically calf or lamb blood was pure and contributed to the sweet nature of the animals, it was thought that if given to someone who was experiencing paranoia and hallucinations, the psychotic symptoms would decrease. This was not the case.

The amounts were usually small enough that the person didn't die. But it did cause frequent transfusion reactions. These reactions frequently caused high fevers, which treated the syphilis and helped decrease the symptoms caused by it.

Naturally, I wanted to double check that this post had any basis in anything and wasn't just lying for clout, and immediately found the following article:

350 Years Ago, A Doctor Performed the First Human Blood Transfusion. A Sheep Was Involved

On this day in 1667, a prominent French physician named Jean-Baptiste Denys performed the first documented blood transfusion to a human. His hapless subject, an unnamed 15-year-old boy, had been bled to promote his health—so much that he was suffering from blood loss. Writing for Wired, Tony Long points out that the transfusion was a little different than those performed in modern hospitals. “He used a sheep’s blood,” writes Long. “And, somehow, the kid survived.”

The boy didn’t get better because of the sheep’s blood, which was likely administered in a negligible quantity—the only reason he didn’t die. Nor did the butcher who Denys subsequently performed the experiment on. Human blood and sheep’s blood aren’t compatible. Human blood is frequently not even compatible with other human blood. What happens next should be obvious: The scientist, emboldened by the apparent success of early experiments, killed someone. But the story is a bit more complicated than that.

That someone was named Antoine Mauroy, a mentally ill man who was well known in Paris. Denys and his colleagues wondered if performing a transfusion on Mauroy might “cure” him, by replacing his bad blood with good. And rather than transfusing blood from a (likely unwilling) and certainly impure human, they picked a calf. They thought that transfusing the blood of an animal that seemed innocent and pure, they might be able to counteract the things in the man's own blood that were making him act badly.

Mauroy died—although, writes medical historian Holly Tucker, of arsenic poisoning by competing surgeons. But he did survive a first and even a second transfusion.

“Only five or six ounces of calf blood made it into the man,” she writes. “Yet Mauroy began to sweat profusely: his arm and both armpits were burning hot.” Frightened by this reaction, which is now known to be produced by the body’s white blood cells attacking the unfamiliar blood in much the same way as they attack a disease, the doctors stopped what they were doing. They tried again the next day, and perceived that the man seemed more docile and less “mad.”

The third time, though, the inevitable happened. The outcome was a subsequent trial in which Denys was found not responsible for the death. Arsenic, a known poison, was the culprit, not transfusion. But the French court banned transfusion all the same. “For some, the risk that science could create monsters—or worse, corrupt the entire human race with foreign blood—was simply too much to bear,” Tucker writes.

After Denys’ experiments and some failed experiments later the same year in England, no member of the mainstream scientific community attempted to do it again until the nineteenth century. Given that blood transfusion between most different human blood groups (which were not discovered until 1900) or humans and animals is extremely deadly, it’s just as well.

So, you know, there's a potential research rabbit hole to dive deeper into.

Comments

[stepnix]

I'm compelled by how magical this logic is. Not in the "they expected something impossible to get results" way, there's a logic of "like affects like" and imbuing the properties of one substance to another. if you had wizards this could work i guess. fantasy blood transfusion infrastructure without ever finding out what blood types are

[malymin]

It's really something in terms of, like you say, "magical" logic, of symbolic meaning being so concrete it can be transmitted via transfer of substance from one body to another.

It's one thing to see similar beliefs in much older historic contexts - the Völsunga saga, for example, has a character be made "more ferocious" by eating wolf meat. But this is the 1600s and 1700s... the early modern period. And being done by physicians, with a sense of scientific experimentation to the first attempts at the procedure... even though the idea that lambs have some sort of christly redeeming power in their blood is not "scientific" from any kind of secular standpoint.

It really does feel like something that would be done by wizards, and work in a fantasy world.