Today’s Out of Vogue Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
British and French doctors tried transfusing sheep’s blood into humans, hoping that the life force of a docile creature might tame mad passions. In France, Dr. Jean Denis tried it on a wife-beater, with at first good results.
Over in England, on November 25, 1667, a daft impoverished clergyman’s helper, named Arthur Coga, was paid twenty shillings to undergo the experiment, receiving up to twelve ounces of blood from the woolly four-footed beast. “Some think it may have a good effect upon him as a frantic man by cooling his blood,” wrote famed diarist, Samuel Pepys. A large crowd of experts gathered at the Royal Society to observe.
Pepys was pleased to note that the following week, the man addressed the Royal Society in Latin. “He is a little cracked in his head, though he speaks very reasonably,” added Pepys a bit cryptically.
Dr. Richard Lower, a “dexterous anatomist” who presided over the test, stated that he “decided to repeat the treatment several times in an effort to improve [the man’s] mental condition.” Coga, however, either refused or more likely disappeared. Opined Dr. Lower: “i have no doubt that his discovery… will be employed with great profit for the human race, if it is practiced with due consideration and care.”
Over in France, in January of the following year, Dr. Denis performed his third sheep transfusion on the wife-beater, who’d had a relapse to his brutal ways. The man died and the doctor was accused of murder. Sheep transfusion fell out of vogue for a couple hundred years.
Dr. Denys at work.
Culled from: An Underground Education
Post-Mortem Photo Du Jour!
Father’s Embrace
Circa 1850
Sixth-plate daguerreotype, 3.75″ x 3.25″
A man holds his deceased daughter, who has been wrapped in a blanket and posed as if asleep in his arms.
Culled from: Beyond the Dark Veil: Post Mortem & Mourning Photography from The Thanatos Archive
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