n 1667, in France, a 15-year-old boy was stricken with fever. His family consult

Question

n 1667, in France, a 15-year-old boy was stricken with fever. His family consulted local physicians, who prescribed bleeding by leeches – a common treatment at the time for many ailments. After 20 leech treatments, his family consulted Dr. Jean-Baptiste Denys (physician to King Louis XIV). Dr. Denys decided that the boy was overbled and would only live with a blood transfusion. He transfused several ounces (exact # unknown, probably only a few) of blood from a sheep into the boy and the boy lived. He repeated this several times with mixed success, including an attempt in 1668 to a man with a “harmless form of insanity”. (It was thought that transfusing the blood of a lamb would help soothe the temperament of the recipient.)

1. Propose a reason, complete with background physiology, about why this might have worked. Hint: today, blood transfusions are usually given 1 unit – about 1 pint – at a time.)

Explanation / Answer

The boy might have survived the blood transfusion due to smaller volume transfusion at a time, which allowed him to withstand allergic reactions or anaphylactic shock that might have happened due to higher blood volume of foreign origin. even though sheep has iron based red blood cells and share many characteristics with human blood, but still due to the presence of different antigen or foreign cells in larger volume, the immune system might have produced an allergic reaction to it, but transfusion was done at a small scale that didn't produce any allergic reaction and also allowed boy to recover while making his own cells.

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