Richard Lower, working at Oxford, conducted and publicized experiments transfusing blood directly between dogs, keeping one animal alive after draining much of its blood by channeling in blood from a second dog. His technique, using quills and tubes to connect blood vessels, represented the first rigorously documented transfusion success and set the stage for the first attempted human transfusions within just a few years.
Working in the intellectually explosive atmosphere of Restoration-era Oxford, alongside figures like Christopher Wren and Robert Boyle, Richard Lower approached the circulatory system with an engineer's curiosity. He had already helped confirm William Harvey's theory of blood circulation, and he wondered whether blood itself, not just its motion, could be transferred between living bodies.
His technique was crude by modern standards: silver quills inserted into an artery of one dog and a vein of another, connected by short lengths of tube, with the donor's beating heart providing the only pump. Yet it worked well enough that a nearly exsanguinated recipient dog survived and reportedly bounded off the table afterward, to the astonishment of the assembled Royal Society fellows.
Lower published his results and later assisted in some of the first documented human-adjacent transfusion experiments in Europe, though the science of blood types remained two and a half centuries away, meaning early human transfusions often ended in tragedy. Still, his careful documentation of technique and outcome marked a genuine scientific first, an early proof that the ancient dream of transferring vitality from one body to another was not entirely fantasy.