science · 17 January 1691 · 333 years ago
death
Died 17 Jan 1691 (baptized c. 29 Jan 1631).
English physician and physiologist who made the first direct transfusion of blood from one animal to the veins of another (in dogs, 1665). In the early 1660s, he had worked as the assistant of Thomas Willis in Oxford, and became famous for his anatomical work on the brain and nerves. The idea of injecting blood into a living animal, and of doing this not by syringe or bladder, but from one animal to another, was first mentioned by Lower in a Jun 1664 letter to Robert Boyle. In 1665, Lower experimented with dogs. Then in 1666, at the Royal Society, Lower performed (for the first time in England) a transfusion of blood into a human. Arthur Coga, a man described as an "eccentric scholar", was persuaded to receive a transfusion of sheep's blood. The experiment was deemed successful. One of the aims of this experiment had been to see what qualities might be transmitted through transfused blood. (The first ever human blood transfusion was done in Paris). Lower was one of the most skilled and accomplished vivisectionalists of his time. Later, he became the most celebrated physician in London for a while. He published his most important work, Tractatus de corde in 1669, his own anatomical and physiological investigation of the structure and action of the heart.
OnThisDay.net