1669

French Parliament reaffirms verdict of Chatelet court that blood transfusion can only be performed with express approval of Paris Faculty of Medicine (which is to say, never): “The very idea of transfusion flowed from theories and practices that, in Catholic France, were simply untenable. . . . infusion and transfusion experiments relied as well on Cartesian theory . . . such arguments of a body-soul divide flew in the face of the most important traditional teaching of all the Bible. To imagine transfusion meant to dismiss biblical dictates such as in Deuteronomy 12:23, ‘Eat not the blood, for the blood is the life.’ . . . Denis’s attempts to build a reputation on the new science of transfusion were clearly doomed from the beginning (Tucker, ch. 15).