Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History class, a production of I Heart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast, I'm Holly Frye, and I'm Tracy B. Wilson.

So this is a two-parter that I have had on my list for a while.

I scribbled down in a notebook as Jean-Baptiste Denis, Dash Blood.

This is also one that if you are a regular listener to our show, we actually interviewed

a woman we didn't, a previous host Sarah and DeBlinia didn't named Holly Tucker who wrote

a book called Bloodwork about this topic, which I used a lot for this one, but there's

so much more in terms of the narrative of the story than they were able to get into

that it really merits its own discussion.

Because as I started researching Jean-Baptiste Denis's life, which was well before I actually

started doing this episode, it became so immediately apparent that he was embroiled in a lot

of conflict professionally, and the controversial nature of his work was so vehemently opposed

that it really halted the development of medical science in some key areas.

It's also one of those stories that gets told and retold because there are some very intriguing

and titillating facts around it.

In those retellings, things get a little blurry sometimes and some misinformation gets included.

So I thought it was worse really like doing kind of a deeper dive on it.

And Denis's story also happens smack dab in the middle of a time when Europe was absolutely

obsessed with science and very competitively obsessed with science.

The work that was being done in England and France as scientists were racing to understand

what blood really was and how it functioned was very much an intellectual battle between

the two nations.

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