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These beginnings in England and France led to the more frequent use of blood transfusion, but soon afterwards the operation fell into disrepute. Disasters followed the transfusions, and the practice also met with violent opposition on the ground that terrible results, such as the growth of horns, would follow the transfusion of an animal’s blood into a human being. In consequence of this they were actually forbidden in France by the Supreme Court until the Faculté of Paris should signify its approval, but the necessary permission was not given. The “extraordinary success” predicted by Sprat and the sanguine expectations of Pepys and his friends were destined not to be fulfilled until a later age.

For more than a hundred years the possibilities of blood transfusion were almost entirely neglected. There are some isolated references to it in medical writings towards the end of the eighteenth century, but of these it is only necessary to notice two. In 1792, at Eye in Suffolk, blood from two lambs was transfused by a Dr. Russell into a boy suffering from hydrophobia, and he claimed that the patient’s recovery was to be attributed to the treatment. Soon afterwards in 1796 Erasmus Darwin recommended transfusion for putrid fever, cancer of the œsophagus, and in other cases of impaired nutrition. He suggested that the blood should be transferred from donor to recipient through goose quills connected by a short length of chicken’s gut, which could be alternately allowed to fill from the donor and emptied by pressure into the patient. This operation he never actually performed.