The unfortunate animals of Paris

I don't recall reading before about the attempt to rejuvenate human health by transfusing the blood of various animals into humans - in 1667, in Paris:

Beginning in the spring of 1667, public opinion in Paris was rocked by a remarkable affair involving domesticated animals: the first practical experiments to transfuse animal blood into humans for therapeutic purposes. The experiments that came to be known as the “Transfusion Affair” were shrouded in the competing claims of a highly public controversy in which consensus and truth, alongside the animal subjects themselves, were the first victims. “There was never anything that divided opinion as much as we presently witness with the transfusions”, wrote the Parisian lawyer at Parlement, Louis de Basril, late in the affair, in February 1668. “It is a topic of the salons, an amusement at the court, the subject of philosophical dissertations; and doctors talk incessantly about it in all their consultations.”¹

At the centre of the controversy was the young Montpellier physician and “most able Cartesian philosopher” Jean Denis, recently established in Paris, who experimented with animal blood to cure sickness, especially madness, and to prolong life. With the talented surgeon Paul Emmerez, Denis transfused small amounts of blood from the carotid arteries of calves, lambs, and kid goats into the veins of five ailing human patients between June 1667 and January 1668. Two died, but three were purportedly cured and rejuvenated.² The experiments divided the medical establishment and engaged a Parisian public avid for scientific discoveries, especially medical therapies to cure disease and to stay forever young.³ 

The article is quite lengthy, and explains that the reason these animals were chosen was based on some fanciful religious theorising:

For the younger Denis, it was not the exotic and domestic birds of the menagerie, but familiar comestible quadrupeds — calves and lambs and occasionally a kid goat — that could elevate humans, both physiologically and morally. Denis was convinced that the blood of these animals was in fact physiologically superior to human blood because it was morally less disordered, a point he elaborated in the published letter about the first xenotransfusion experiment: 

It is easy to judge that the blood of animals must have less impurity than that of men, for debauchery and derangement in drinking and eating are not as common as among us. The sorrows, the worries, the fits, the melancholies, the anxiety, and generally all the passions that are so many causes of the troubled life of man corrupt the substance of his blood; instead, the life of the animal is much better regulated and less exposed to these miseries, the dreadful consequences of the sins of our first father [Adam].

....For Denis, it was the moral and physiological superiority of animal blood that made transfusion a positive intervention. Moreover, in part to justify rhetorically his experiments, he consistently invoked not only the theological debasement of man, but also the moral purity, in the Christian tradition, of certain animals — notably lambs, with the implicit reference to the “lamb of God” and to the logic of the Eucharist as a source of eternal life.

And more, further down:

Denis’ own moralization of animal blood clearly partook of Renaissance humanimalism and the theriophiliac tradition of the “Happy Beast” that informed a corpus of philosophical, literary, and scientific thinking in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and that upheld the moral superiority of animals against the debased condition of humans. By the middle of the seventeenth century, theriophilia had become a widely accepted doctrine among the educated classes, from erudite libertines, to natural philosophers, to theologians. Animals were seen as not only linked to humans by kinship and proximity, but also as moral exemplars, less subjected to destructive passions that marked the fallen condition of man. 

I am pretty amused by the last bit in this extract: 

Encouraged by the results, Denis and Emmerez completed a second operation a week later, admittedly “more by curiosity than necessity”, on a robust, healthy porter of forty-five to whom a fee was paid. Denis reported on his instant energetic response and cheerful nature. Far from being debilitated by the transfusion, the porter quickly got up and slaughtered, skinned, and dressed the donor lamb for consumption, after which he went out drinking in the local pub, returning the next day to volunteer for any further trials. And these renewed appetites were not limited to food. Christian Huygens wrote to his brother: “It is said that he performed marvelous feats that night with his wife, this last detail spreading among the ladies has made them favorable to the new practice, and one can only find too many who would want their husbands transfused.”¹⁸

The article is also nicely illustrated.