Blood Work (15 page)

Denis' claims were all the more surprising because, in 1658, Montmor's academy had shown almost no interest in medical topics. Instead the Montmorians had thrown themselves headlong into astronomy and had been eagerly awaiting news of Huygens's studies of Saturn. With the exception of Denis' solitary account, no extant historical documents confirm Desgabets' alleged presentation at the Montmor Academy. What is more, had Desgabets actually presented his ideas at the academy, Denis would have been unlikely to have heard them firsthand. Little more than twenty-two years old at the time, he would not yet have finished medical school, and as a young man of lower-class origins, he would hardly have been invited to meetings at Montmor's estate. Denis' self-assured assertions were, then, no more than wishful hearsay or, worse, complete fabrications.

John Wallis, a fellow of the Royal Society, had anticipated Denis' arrogant claims. He had long been worried that the society was insufficiently aggressive in its efforts to take full ownership of its discoveries. Wallis had shared his concerns with Henry Oldenburg as early as March 1667, nearly three months before Denis' scandalous letter. Wallis noted the publicity that had surrounded Denis' thievery—which he called the “French operation in imitation”—and told Oldenburg that he could “only wish that those of our own Nation were a little more forward than I find them generally to be in timely publishing their own
Discoveries, & not let strangers reap the glory of what those amongst ourselves are the Authors.”
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Wallis's warnings were certainly prescient. Now Denis' letter had just upstaged English claims to dominance in the blood wars. Wallis's message was a clear critique of Oldenburg's work at the Royal Society. The tasks Wallis described fell squarely on Oldenburg's shoulders as both secretary of the society and editor of its
Philosophical Transactions
. If discoveries by Royal Society members were not recorded appropriately or announced in a way that glorified the society's intellectual and scientific endeavors, it was Oldenburg who would have to answer for it.

The timing of Denis' letter could not have been worse for Oldenburg politically. Xenophobic tensions usually bubbled over in England in the wake of disaster, and following England's recent disgrace at the Battle of Medway, animosities toward foreigners had hit a new high. Earlier that month, on the morning of June 6, a dense fog had cloaked the English coast near the Isle of Sheppey. Quietly and undetected, nearly one hundred Dutch ships entered the well-protected estuary of the Thames and sailed into the nearby river Medway. By the time the fog cleared and the alarms were sounded, it was too late. The Dutch fleet continued upriver and toward the shipyards of the huge naval base at Chatham, where it captured the one-hundred-gun
Royal Charles.
The Dutch gloated while the British navy's largest and best-equipped battleship was towed back to Rotterdam. As Pepys noted shortly after the defeat, “The Dutch do mightly insult of their victory, and they have good reason.”
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Lord Arlington, Charles II's powerful secretary of state, scrambled to deflect any blame for the stunning defeat from himself. The commissioner of the Royal Navy at Chatham, Peter Pett, was made the official scapegoat for the Medway disaster; he was promptly imprisoned in the Tower of London. Immediately following the attack Arlington set out to
expose other “traitors” who might have helped smooth the way for England's disgrace.

As the violence inflicted on the French and Dutch following the Great Fire had shown, foreigners were always a prime target in seventeenth-century England when both the government and the populace sought to exact vengeance for their losses. The German-born Oldenburg knew he was at risk during this moment of high international tension that followed the battle at Medway. He may have integrated himself seamlessly into English society, but he would never be considered fully English. And he was well aware that his prodigious correspondence, combined with his mastery of more than seven languages, could leave him vulnerable to intense government scrutiny. Oldenburg was now at the top of Arlington's list of traitors.

Given his frequent communication with colleagues on the Continent, Oldenburg had been wise enough to protect himself from royal spies and postal censors. Established in 1635, the post office served as much as a mechanism of domestic surveillance as a means to ensure the timely delivery of packages and letters.
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Chief among the censors was the inventor Samuel Morland, who occupied a secret room adjacent to the General Letter Office. Morland had even taken one of Arlington's own letters and made several copies, apparently returning the original unopened—proving, as the French ambassador Comminges noted, that the “English have tricks to open letters more skillfully than anywhere in the world.”
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Royal censorship posed a threat to privacy that the wealthy could not risk; for this reason they paid private couriers who creatively disguised their letters and packages to avoid detection. “Several letters I carried to and brought from France,” wrote one courier, “were made up as the mould of a button, and so work'd over with silk, or silver, or worn on my clothes. Others I brought
over in the pipes of keys.”
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Some especially cautious writers bound their letters in books or wrote in code or with invisible ink. Penning their words in a clear solution of vinegar mixed with lead oxide, they would overwrite them with a less-secretive message in visible ink. The recipient would use arsenic trisulfide and limewater to dilute the visible ink, turning the invisible script gray and legible. Human urine was another liquid sometimes used for invisible ink; the writers would dip the end of the quill in the urine and lightly trace their words onto the paper. Letters could then be held over the steam of “a compound of several spirits, metals and sulphur boyl'd together and made liquid” to reveal their contents.
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Oldenburg did not have the resources to employ such elaborate measures. Instead he approached fellow Royal Society member and Keeper of State Papers, Joseph Williamson. Williamson had a quiet reputation for the “illicit side of the Post Office's activities.”
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The two men decided that all of Oldenburg's incoming correspondence would be addressed to a pseudonym, “Mr. Grubendol, London.” Williamson retrieved the letters and gave them to Oldenburg unopened. In return Oldenburg agreed to provide Williamson with excerpts of any political news that the letters contained. For this, Oldenburg received reduced mailing fees, and Williamson could stay apprised of activities abroad.
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But it soon became clear that Williamson's “protections” could only go so far.

 

R
oyal guards surrounded Oldenburg's modest home in Pall Mall. We can only imagine that Oldenburg was filled with confusion and fear as he was whisked away from his home without warning. He was taken by coach to the banks of the Thames and from there likely escorted onto a boat that would move him to the Tower. Water transfer was more secure than transportation
through the streets and over the London Bridge, where carriages could be easily overtaken to allow prisoners a chance to escape the terrifying fate that awaited them. Prisoners charged with treason entered on the banks of the Thames through the “Traitors' Gate,” where more famous figures like Anne Boleyn, Sir Thomas More, and Sir Walter Raleigh had entered. Two large barred gates slowly creaked open to reveal several dour-faced guards who awaited their next prisoner. The guards led Oldenburg through the gateway of the menacing “Bloody Tower” and to his dark and modest cell.

The charges against Oldenburg were vague, accusing him simply of “dangerous desseins and practices.” But for contemporaries such as the diarist Samuel Pepys, there was little doubt that Oldenburg's connections with the French had everything to do with Lord Arlington's suspicions: “Mr. Oldenburg, our Secretary at Gresham College, is put in the Tower for writing news to a virtuoso in France, with whom he constantly corresponds in philosophical matters; which makes it very unsafe at this time to write, or almost do anything.”
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Historians have been unable to pinpoint with certainty the exact source of Arlington's suspicions. Yet Oldenburg received Denis' letter the very day of his arrest.
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While we cannot know if it was the precise cause of his arrest, it is nonetheless certain that Denis' letter, with its outrageous claims of French superiority, did little to help Oldenburg's case.

Two weeks later, in Oldenburg's absence, the president of the Royal Society, John Wilkins, summarized the contents of Denis' letters to his colleagues at the society's July 4 meeting. The report was greeted with outrage. As Royal Society fellow Timothy Clarke later fumed, “I am not so clear why that learned Frenchman disputes so vigorously and so warmly over the origin of blood transfusion.” With barrister-like precision, Clarke
refuted in writing Denis' claims that the French were first to imagine blood transfusion, and reviewed the history of English blood experiments. Clarke cited John Aubrey, who documented Francis Potter's suggestions in 1639 that transfusion would be an ideal way to test Harvey's ideas on blood circulation. He confirmed that later, in 1653, Potter had apparently collected the blood of one animal in a dish and tried transfusing it into another by using ivory tubes and quills. The procedure failed, ostensibly because of the time lapse between collection and transfusion, which caused the donor blood to clot.
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Clarke then moved to Christopher Wren, who “first thought of (and performed at Oxford) the injection of various liquors into the mass of the blood of living animals.” Clarke further claimed that, in the following year, he himself had injected “waters, various kinds of beer, milk and whey, broths, wines, alcohol, and the blood of different animals” into dogs. Clarke concluded his arguments by describing Richard Lower's canine experiments in 1666, asserting that this should be sufficient evidence that “the honor for this invention—if it deserves any—should be awarded to the English rather than the French.”
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N
ow, denied pen and paper in his oppressive prison in the Tower of London, Oldenburg had no way of communicating that he was innocent. A single letter was delivered to his cell a few weeks after his imprisonment. It was from Williamson, who urged Oldenburg to remain patient—he would soon be released. While still fearful that he might not leave the Tower alive, at least he now had a piece of paper. Oldenburg begged his jailers for ink and a pen. He received this “particular favor”—for which he paid handsomely, no doubt—and wrote on the back of Williamson's letter the urgent pleas of a man who believed that his days were numbered.

Oldenburg was right to be concerned about the “narrowness of his fortune” while in the Tower. Early prison protocol required prisoners to pay their own room and board. The choice of lodging in England's most notorious prison was dictated by the amount that a “guest” could pay. By law, jailers could also charge extra for
sauvitas
(gentle keeping). And depending on the payment received, accommodations could range from comfortable to squalid—that is, from a spacious room with a bed, a desk, and a view to a windowless cell shared with several other men and straw on the floor for a bed. Even exonerated of charges, prisoners could and did remain in jail indefinitely if they were unable to clear the debts incurred during their stay. And debts could accrue very fast.

There is no evidence that Williamson replied; Oldenburg paced alone in his dark cell, anxious and deprived of writing material. About two weeks after his correspondence with Williamson, Oldenburg received a visitor who provided him with some glimmer of hope that he might leave the Tower alive. Oldenburg was
able to persuade the visitor, whose name remains unknown to us, to write a letter to the bishop of Salisbury to intervene on his behalf. Oldenburg was unnerved by the fact that no official charges had been levied against him but still he had been left to languish in one of London's most notorious jails. “I am not guilty of anything,” Oldenburg wrote via his acquaintance, “and all who know me well can attest my love, concern and zeal for the King's and the kingdom's interest and prosperity. Besides, I have employed even my correspondencing to give advertisement to the Court, such as I thought might be useful to England…. And now I beseech your Lordship that you would please to take all the opportunities you can to represent me to his Majesty and to my Lord Arlington, and with all to engage such of your noble friends, as are in the King's favor.”
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Oldenburg's pleas fell on deaf ears. An exercise in futility, the letter never made it to the bishop; it was confiscated from the visitor as he left the Tower.
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