Holly Tucker, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Medicine, Health & Society and Associate Professor of French Studies at Vanderbilt University, where she teaches the history of medicine. Her work has appeared in the New Scientist, the San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, and the Wall Street Journal.

Please visit www.holly-tucker.com



BLOOD WORK:
A Tale of Murder and Medicine in the Scientific Revolution
W. W. Norton, March 2011
Genre: Science & Health
Agent: Faith Hamlin

In Paris, 1667, the renegade physician Jean Denis transfused just over ten ounces of calf’s blood into a madman named Antoine Mauroy. Several days and several transfusions later, Mauroy was dead. And Denis was charged with murder.

In a world of medicine before anesthesia and antisepsis, blood transfusion was a dangerous, controversial new procedure that challenged deep fears within seventeenth-century Europe. Medical men, like Denis, understood that early transfusion held great promise for curing a variety of illnesses. But others had concerns that science was toying with forces of nature. Blood transfusion would soon be banned across Europe nearly as quickly as it began—and would not to be resuscitated again for another 250 years.

Set in London and France during Scientific Revolution, this novelistic narrative explores the rise—and initial demise—of one of modern medicine’s most common procedures.