Arnold de Villa Nova on the therapeutic use of human blood / by Joseph Frank Payne.

  • Payne, Joseph Frank, 1840-1910.
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Arnold de Villa Nova on the therapeutic use of human blood / by Joseph Frank Payne. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    he might have obtained as much blood as he required without bleeding them to death. Whether the Pope would have been saved, or been any better for the elixir, if prepared, is quite another matter. I cannot discuss the further history of transfusion. Professor Landois, who has done so much to elucidate this question, has quoted in the work above mentioned, passages from Hieronymus Cardanus, towards the end of the sixteenth century, Magnus Pegelius in 1604, Andreas Libavius in 1615, who criticises the last named author with bitter sarcasm, and Johannes Colie of Padua 1628, showing that the possibili' y of transferring the blood of one person to another was discussed. Cardanus says; “There “are some who hope to he able to exchange the blood (of one man) for “that of a healthy young man by a double tube, and some by a single “tube.” Pegelius uses mysterious terms which seem to hint at something of the same kind. Libavius describes an imaginary operation by which blood was passed through a tube from the artery of a robust man into the artery of a weak man: but shows that he did not take the matter seriously when he ends with recommending hellehore ter the Doctor (to cure his madness). J. Colle suggests that blood might be passed by a tube from the veins of one man into the veins of another, but that the oper- ation would be useless. With great respect for the eminent physiologist, one must doubt whether these operations were more than talked about. There is no evidence that they were actually performed. For before Harvey’s discovery of the circu- lation, such an operation would have been hardly reasonable. When the veins were thought to conduct blood away from the heart, what would be the use on this theory of introducing fresh blood into a vein, to be transmitted, if at all, only to its peripheral branches? Again to transfer blood by a tube from one artery to another would be going against the stream, and the suggestion made by Libavius seems to have been ironical. The whole thing seems ideal rather than actual; unless indeed some of these physicians had tried such experiments and failed; of wh'ch there is no evidence. At all events we must agree with Landois that these numerous allusions to transfusion of blood, which are met with eq ecially in Italy, not based upon a knowledge of the circulation, are from a scientific point of view entirely worthless, as indeed the more sagacious contemporaries probably perceived. The English investigators, he says, were right in asserting that they had borrowed their invention from no foreign source. The first actual transference of blood from one animal to another was performed by Richard Lower at Oxford, February 1665—66; and reported by Willis to the Royal Society of London in the following June (1666).