About book Blood Work: A Tale Of Medicine And Murder In The Scientific Revolution (2011)
This is an interesting book, taking an almost novelistic approach to the early, and clumsy, history of blood transfusions in 17th century France. The characters could, perhaps, have been better developed, but there's a difficult line between being historically true and substantiated, and fiction. Tucker stays well on the side of the verifiable. She could also have built on the parallels between the 17th and 21st centuries in the introduction of new technologies. She starts down that path, but it could have been richer. A worthwhile read, if not a page turner. I feel like I should have liked this book more. For heaven's sake, the real D'Artagnan (and Fouquet, and Mlle. de la Valliere) make appearances! Yet I felt that the tangents were pretty wide, the experiments were too inhumane (I do not blame this on the author--she reported what happened, but what happened to a large number of dogs and other animals that served as experimental subjects was off-putting), and the murder mentioned in the title opened the book to hook the reader and then closed it with a whimper because of the minimal supporting documentation (it wasn't precisely a mystery whodunit in the first place). That being said, it sets up an excellent philosophical question to ponder: Great medical discoveries sometimes require that boundaries be pushed, be they physical, philosophical, ethical, or moral. When are these boundary-challenging experiments OK? When should they be encouraged? When should they be stopped?
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Great history of science book. Well written. Glad I live in the modern world!
—angelbabiexx2
Fascinating story that has relevance in today's research on the human body.
—mana02
A gory but dull chronicle of early blood transfusion experiments.
—Janet52
Should've been a great story, but it was written poorly.
—isy
