LIFE LINES 35

HOW ONE THING IS CONNECTED TO ANOTHER: THE ORDEAL OF SAMUEL PEPYS

Teachers learn that any one thing is connected to everything. Students initially believe that no one thing is connected to anything. A semester of literature, mathematics, history, and science are disconnected in all but a scholar’s mind. Let me give you an example. What do Setauket, diaries, treason, New Amsterdam, the Vatican, ship-design, forgery, murder, map-making and habeas corpus have in common? I learned that they were all part of the life of John Scott. Because I keep a diary, inspired by Samuel Pepys’ entries in the 1660s, I checked out a book at the Emma Clark Library in Setauket by James and Ben Long, The Plot Against Pepys. Pepys was Secretary of the Admiralty and a founder of the Royal Society of Science during the reign of Charles II in the 1660s and 1670s.

John Scott was born in England and raised by his widowed mother in Southampton, Long Island. As a young adult he began to pursue wealth and power. He went back to England on money he had stolen and sold land he didn’t own to wealthy British investors. He returned to Long Island and forced those living in Setauket to move, using forged documents from the royal family. He played off Connecticut and Long Island in a land dispute and instigated the British to attack New Amsterdam and drive the Dutch from New York. He was imprisoned in Connecticut but escaped and when he was turned down for a government position on Long Island, he left for Europe, serving as a spy for Britain, France, and the Netherlands. He forged military maps of Britain to sell to the Dutch and French; and he forged maps of France and the Netherlands to sell to the British. In 1679 he returned to England and developed a scheme to frame Pepys and other supporters of James Stuart (King Charles’s Catholic brother) as part of a “Papist plot” to kill King Charles and return Great Britain to the Catholic Church.

Pepys, who was not Catholic, was arrested and sent to the Tower of London. After several months, he managed to get released on habeas corpus (ironically freed of its loopholes by the plotting members of Parliament who wanted to prevent James from ascending to the throne). Pepys assembled a powerful defense by having his friends obtain documents of the fraud, forgery, perjury, thefts, escapes, and assaults that Scott had accumulated in his pathological career. The charges were dropped after Scott killed a coach driver in a drunken brawl. Pepys was restored to his post in the Admiralty and his good name was restored. Scott escaped to the Netherlands and stayed there until Charles II died. When James II ascended to the throne, Scott joined the forces of William of Orange in the Netherlands and returned to England with a Dutch armada. James fled to exile and the House of Orange became the new royal line for Great Britain. As a reward for his service, Scott was given a pardon for his murder and sent to Montserrat in the Caribbean as a government official, where he led a comfortable life and died of old age. Pepys was forced to retire after James fled and spent his last years preparing his library and papers for donation to Oxford University.

I would certainly not have believed in 1948, when I first read excerpts of Pepys’ diaries and started my own, that I would connect these 60 years later, through Scott’s life to Setauket where I now live.

Life lines 10

WHY I LOVE THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE: THE STORY OF THE FIRST HUMAN BLOOD TRANSFUSION

I like to go back to original sources when I write my books on the history of science. It’s not just a matter of getting the names and dates right. When you go back the past leaps out of a page or document and surprises you with novelty. While working on the history of blood groups for a book on the history of human genetics, I came across a reference that the first blood transfusion in a human was carried out in 1667 and the donor was a sheep. My first thought was that this was a long time ago and the patient must have died from the transfusion. My second thought (on the use of the sheep) was that the sheep was docile and convenient. I looked up the cited entry in Samuel Pepys’s diary and learned that the patient was a 32 year old Cambridge graduate, Arthur Coga, who was a Latin scholar and whose minister thought him on the verge of lunacy. He consulted a physician who recommended cooling his brain with a blood transfusion. In those days the brain was believed to be the place where the blood was cooled, a logical inference for fevered brains causing delirium and for violent tempered people who are still called hot blooded.

Coga was asked what type of blood he wanted as a coolant and he said he wanted a lamb’s blood because Jesus is the Lamb of God (Agnus Dei) and if he couldn’t have the Savior’s blood, the closest thing in purity must be that of a lamb. He was given about 12 ounces of blood by canula and survived. Pepys recounted Coga’s conversation at the Royal Society a week after his transfusion and reported Coga as lucid in his conversation. Coga also told his questioners that he was looking forward to a second transfusion of sheep blood.

Transfusions of animal blood to humans that same year in France led to several deaths and there was a ban on human blood transfusions in most countries until Karl Landsteiner in 1900 identified specific blood types in humans (initially he called them I, II, and III). They were renamed A, B, and O a few years later and the rarer AB group was found by two of Landsteiner’s students. Surprisingly it took almost 20 years to do effective transfusions because blood tends to clot and anti-clotting chemicals were not found until 1914. Blood banks did not come into existence until the early 1930s. I do not know if Coga had that second transfusion. It is likely, if he did, that it would have killed him from the shock reaction of his immune system. I also do not know how long the placebo effect lasted from his first transfusion.

But as a contemporary scientist I would never have imagined that a sheep’s blood was the source for a first human blood transfusion. Nor would I have imagined that the transfusion was made for religious reasons. Nor would I have imagined that the transfusion was given to treat a mental illness rather than to replace a loss of blood. The pleasure of doing history of science is that it reveals how different were the assumptions about life, science, and values when we go back in time. It also serves as a reinforcement of healthy skepticism so that we resist the temptation to interpret the past through the expectations of the present.