Sheep/Lamb & Blood Transfusions
It was June 1667 when French physician Jean-Baptiste Denys performed the first documented blood transfusion to a human. Denys was helping a 15-year-old boy who had been treated by bloodletting which caused him to suffer blood loss. To save him, Denys used sheep’s blood. The teen remarkably survived but it was by luck alone. Denys then tried “cure” a mentally ill man named Antoine Mauroy as Denys & his colleagues felt replacing his “bad blood” with “good blood” would help him. Keep in mind, during this time doctors were still ignorant about many things, including mental health. Sadly, Mauroy died mostly because humans struggle to handle even other human blood, let alone blood from animals. However, he did survive the first & even second transfusions. He’d technically die truly by arsenic poisoning from surgeons.