ON THE TRANSFUSION OF BLOOD. 681 



they are of too general an interest to be reserved for physiologists and 

 physicians ; they must enter into the wide domain of Science. 



In the order of scientific facts a great discovery never remains iso- 

 lated, but opens unknown horizons, and leads to useful applications, 

 by the conquest of new principles. No one, nowadays, is ignorant 

 that the labors of Ampere in electricity and magnetism created the 

 telegraph. In Harvey's time, circulation was accepted, spite of pro- 

 tests by the faculty and the disciples of Galen ; a genius like Descartes 

 publishes it in his famous " Discourse on Method ; " demonstration by 

 experiment confirms the position of theory in every point ; and the 

 most important consequences immediately follow. They affect the 

 knowledge of drugs and poisons, the anatomy of man, and the medical 

 art that heals him. It was easily understood that medicinal and in- 

 jurious substances will act more promptly if introduced directly into 

 the vessels, and Fabricius, a doctor of Dantzic, infused purgative salts 

 into the veins. Fracassati, a professor of anatomy at Pisa, injected 

 alcohol, spirits of vitriol, oil of sulphur and of tartar. These experi- 

 ments did not advance the healing art much, but they led to one im- 

 portant consequence, probably unlooked for by their authors : they 

 were the commencement of a process which allows us to study the 

 nature of poisons ; and the history of poisoning afterward took a new 

 direction. 



To the physician and the anatomist the process of transfusion was 

 directly and immediately useful. A century earlier, the illustrious 

 Andreas Vesalius had created human anatomy ; after the publication 

 of Harvey's works, the arteries and veins were studied in preference. 

 In the class-room where dissections are going on, it is out of the ques- 

 tion to transfuse living blood ; but, for the advantage of following the 

 course and distribution of the vessels, it is useful to inject them with 

 such colored matters as will solidify. The Dutch Frederic Ruysch is 

 the leader in this advance. In the land of Rembrandt the art of har- 

 monizing colors aims not merely to bring the human countenance 

 to life again on canvas ; the anatomist of Leyden so well understands 

 the secret of injections that, by imparting color to the interior of the 

 tissues, he will restore the semblance of life to inanimate bodies ; when, 

 near the end of his long career, Ruysch put to press in Amsterdam the 

 remarkable book in which he describes the wonders of the anatomical 

 museum of his native town, like an artist content with the perfection 

 of his work, he exclaims, at the first page, " I have babies there that 

 have been embalmed for twenty years ; they are so rosy and fresh that 

 you would say they are not dead, but asleep." 



Ruysch's anatomical preparations, of which the secret is now lost, 

 were contemporary with that marvellous experience, also founded on 

 the discovery of Harvey we mean transfusion of actual blood. About 

 1660 the notions in medicine of the ancients were strongly and per- 



