When, more than a century after Denis’s work, the English obstetrician James Blundell employed transfusion to save a few of his hemorrhaging postpartum patients, his work did not really have a dramatic effect on the practice of medicine. Until the discovery of blood groups in 1901 by Landsteiner, successful transfusions were a rare event in medicine. Despite some initial successes, he was eventually prevented from continuing experimentation with blood transfusion in humans in France. Denis, with the support of a wealthy patron, challenged the medical establishment of Paris. Denis was an outsider, from a provincial school in Montpelier rather than the Paris School of Medicine. The tale mainly deals with the career of the iconoclastic French physician Jean-Baptiste Denis. The final chapters recounting events in Paris from 1667 to 1668 are particularly riveting in the end, the primary patient being treated was murdered by a physician who was opposed on religious and conceptual grounds to the very idea of blood transfusions. The main thrust of the tragic story is that transfusions were ultimately forbidden for centuries in France because of medical politics, personality clashes, and scientific and religious dogma. The narrative has an intimate style that includes precise descriptions of people and events as well as reconstructions of conversations that were never documented. Holly Tucker, a medical historian at Vanderbilt, has written a history of the ill-fated first animal and human blood transfusions during the early phase of the scientific revolution of the late 17th century in England and France.

Blood Work by Holly Tucker