This disturbing story began in the early 1600s when the English physician William Harvey stated that the heart pumps blood through the body. Like most unorthodox ideas, Harvey’s theory took some time to catch on. But by mid-century, scientists realized that Harvey’s explanation of the circulatory system meant that blood transfusions were theoretically possible. They soon began to test this theory on animals.
The first experiments
In 1656, Christopher Wren injected ale and wine into a dog’s veins. The dog, of course, became very drunk. Wren’s experiment proved beyond a doubt that Harvey’s circulation theory was true – the veins carried substances through the body.
In 1665, Richard Lower performed the first successful blood transfusions between dogs. In truth, the donor dogs never survived, but the recipients usually lived for a while. Lower’s rather dubious success ignited the imaginations of English intellectuals.
The pioneering chemist Robert Boyle asked if a blood transfusion from one dog to another might change the dog’s fur color or abilities. Samual Pepys, a renowned diarist, wondered how the discovery might benefit humans. The Royal Society was intrigued, as were the French. These ideas set in motion a competition between the two countries to succeed at xenotransfusion (transfusion between species).
The gruesome race to heal humans with animal blood
Jean-Baptiste Denys, a French doctor, was the first to perform an animal-to-human blood transfusion. In 1667, Denys bled a feverish boy and transfused sheep’s blood. He quickly proclaimed that the transfusion had healed the boy.
The child may not have been healed, but he survived, making the transfusion a considerable success. Denys performed another successful xenotransfusion with a butcher as the recipient of the sheep’s blood.
Not to be outdone by the French, Richard Lower enters the story once more. Lower choose Arthur Coga as his test subject. Coga was a mentally ill Divinity Graduate of Cambridge, whose education and ability to write in Latin made him seem like the perfect candidate. Lower believed Coga could accurately describe the effects of the transfusions for the Royal Society.
Arthur Coga’s transfusions
Lower and his contemporaries in the Royal Society believed that Lower’s condition meant that his brain was “a little too warm.” Naturally, they argued that a lamb’s blood could cool Coga’s blood down and eliminate his illness. On November 23, 1667, Lower performed the xenotransfusion with the Royal Society’s elite scientists as witnesses.
Using a sharpened quill, Lower punched into the sheep’s carotid artery. He then inserted a metal tube into the quill to allow six or seven ounces of blood to drain into a bowl. This process helped him understand how long he needed to perform the xenotransfusion. Next, Lower opened a vein in Coga’s arm and allowed six or seven ounces of blood to drain from him.
Finally, Lower placed a metal tube between two quills, one in the lamb and one in Coga, and allowed blood to flow from the lamb into Coga. Lower repeated this process on December 12 of the same year. Coga was paid 20 shillings both times to be the subject of this bizarre experiment.
Coga the Sheep-Man
The Royal Society thought that if they could heal Coga’s illness by xenotransfusion, they would defeat the French in the mad race to heal humans with transfusions of animal blood. However, Coga refused another transfusion. Not only was Coga’s illness unrelieved, he now believed that the experiment had “transformed him into another species.”
In his letter to the Royal Society Fellows, Coga signed his name “Agnus Coga,” Latin for “Coga the Sheep.” Coga was publicly mocked and began drinking heavily. This disturbing turn of events made the Royal Society the object of public ridicule.
News soon came from France that Denys’ third transfusion patient had died. Soon the Royal Society gave up on blood transfusions, but they remained humiliated for years. A decade after the debacle, Thomas Shadwell wrote a play in which a virtuoso accidentally creates a sheep-man when he transfuses blood into a drunken man.
The end of Coga the Sheep-Man is unclear – after his transformation, he wandered into obscurity.