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A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution
W. W. Norton & Company
April 2011
On Sale: March 21, 2011
304 pages
ISBN: 0393070557
EAN: 9780393070552
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
On a cold day in 1667, a renegade physician named Jean Denis
transfused calf's blood into one of Paris's most notorious
madmen. In doing so, Denis angered not only the elite
scientists who had hoped to perform the first
animal-to-human transfusions themselves, but also a host of
powerful conservatives who believed that the doctor was
toying with forces of nature that he did not understand.
Just days after the experiment, the madman was dead, and
Denis was framed for murder. A riveting account of the first blood transfusion
experiments in 17th-century Paris and London, Blood Work
gives us a vivid glimpse of a particularly fraught period in
history--a time of fire and plague, empire building and
international distrust, when monsters were believed to
inhabit the seas and the boundary between science and
superstition was still in flux. Amid this atmosphere of
uncertainty, transfusionists like Denis became embroiled in
the hottest cultural debates and fiercest political
rivalries of their day. As historian Holly Tucker reveals,
transfusion's detractors would stop at nothing--not even
murdering Denis's patient--to outlaw a practice that might
jeopardize human souls, pave the way for monstrous hybrid
creatures, or even provoke divine retribution. Taking us from the highest ranks of society to the lowest,
from dissection rooms in palaces to the filth-clogged
streets of Paris, Blood Work sheds light on an era that
wrestled with the same questions about morality and
experimentation that haunt medical science to this day.
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