Book Reviews centuries, Denis was the leading advocate in a death knell to such experimentation in the France for transfusing good, healthy blood into ensuing decades. Indeed, the need to gain diseased patients. Such procedures, the consensus from such a divisive professional mathematician noted, had an advantage over body prohibited further attempts at transfusion blood-letting in that the overall blood volume for 150 years. could be maintained. The fact that the donor was Some readers may be bothered by Moore’s non-human was of little consequence to Denis. readiness to skip forward within his chapters, To establish the context surrounding medical filling the readers with more up-to-date wisdom of the period, Moore summarizes information of the subsequent findings about pertinent elements of Cartesian and Harveian blood and transfusion. Indeed, it was a bit as well as the new experimental disconcerting to jump into twentieth-century philosophy that was being espoused by blood typing and incompatible transfusion England’s Royal Society and emulated by knowledge in the midst of his chapter on ‘Denis’ France’s Acade´mie Royale des Sciences. We route to the top’. Perhaps such information gain a glimpse of the channels through which should have been relegated to an epilogue or men like Denis advocated innovative added to the otherwise helpful timeline of experimental procedures in order to gain favour, seventeenth-century blood transfusion at the thereby accelerating their societal rise. The close of the book. Doing this towards the final rivalries so typical in histories of England and pages would reinforce the timeliness of a history France are played out here in the claim of of blood transfusion. It would also have allowed priority over which nation’s natural philosophers the author to include references leading curious had first uncovered the benefits of blood readers to more thorough histories of the transfusion. importance of blood and modifications of blood Denis transfused some five or six ounces of the transfusion over time. An index would also calf’s blood into Mauroy through a series of have been of immense help. quills that he had connected into one continuous Upon reflection, I am left craving more pipeline. Although not the first time he had medical and scientific history to be delivered in performed such a transfusion into humans, it was such a lively manner. Perhaps BBC television his first time for using this technique in attempt to should be thinking how best to feature Moore’s cure a patient who was deemed physically important historical writing before an even wider well, but mentally deranged. audience, one that it clearly deserves. What initially appeared as an ‘‘incredible cure’’ (p.154), soon took a deleterious pathway Philip K Wilson, upon which, after three transfusions over a series Penn State University College of of weeks, Mauroy died and Denis was indicted for murder. Using the documentary evidence Walter Bernardi and Luigi Guerrini (eds), from the trial and contemporary European Francesco Redi, un protagonista della scienza medical writings, Moore sets up a debate moderna: documenti, esperimenti, immagini, between all of these authorities in a manner Biblioteca di Nuncius, Studi e Testi 33, , similar to Walter Cronkite’s ‘You Are There’ US Leo S Olschki, 1999, pp. xi, 388, L 75,000 innovative television series of the 1950s. (paperback 88-222-47191). Although this setting is admittedly fictitious, it is believable as it is based solely upon accurate, The twenty papers in this collection aim to contemporary accounts. At the conclusion of this create a comprehensive image of the physician scintillating scene, we find that Denis was and courtier Francesco Redi (1626–1698). The acquitted, but the magistrate’s decision that ‘‘no book is divided into four overlapping sections: transfusion should be made upon any human Redi’s laboratory work as it appears in his body without the approval of the physicians of notebooks; his relationship with the science of his the Parisian Faculty [of Medicine]’’ (p. 205) dealt time; Redi viewed through the social context of

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