A Curious Discovery Concerning Blood and Salt
How a butcher's trick led Dr. Stevens to a new treatment for yellow fever
A French physician's chance observation of a butcher salting pig's blood led to a startling reduction in yellow fever deaths among troops in the West Indies—an obscure but consequential medical discovery worth remembering.
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The Morning Star And Catholic Messenger · June 16, 1872 · Page 2
1 min readDr. Stevens, a French physician, saw a butcher killing a pig. He observed that he stirred the blood of the animal, and added a handful of common salt to it while stirring, which immediately made it crimson, and the stirring being discontinued, it remained fluid. The change of color awakened his curiosity.
The butcher could give no explanation of the phenomenon, except that it kept it from jellying and spoiling. Dr. Stevens seized a vessel, caught some blood, and made several experiments by putting salt into it, and found that the blackest blood was instantly changed to a bright vermillion by salt.
"And," said he, "there was a fact that might lead to a practical rule." He had observed, in cases of yellow fever in the army, that the blood drawn was very black and fluid, and, on adding salt, it became vermillion and retained its freshness; whereas putridity of the blood is one of the characteristics of yellow fever.
He therefore abandoned the usual mode of treatment, and gave his patients a mixture of various salts, and in a very short time reduced the mortality of fever in the West Indies from one in five to one in fifty.
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