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guinea, which was immediately accepted on the part of the Society.”
    Coga had studied divinity at Cambridge but had suffered some kind of mental breakdown. That combination of credentials made Coga a perfect subject—his word could be trusted, since he was a gentleman, and he was mad, so he was intriguing. The hope was that the blood transfusion would cure him, though no one had any very good reason to think that might happen. While the crowd looked on, a surgeon made an incision into the sheep’s leg and another into Coga’s arm and then maneuvered a thin, silver pipe into place between them.
    For two minutes blood passed from the sheep into Coga’s body. Remarkably, Coga survived (although he did not recover his sanity). “After the operation the patient was well and merry,” the surgeon reported, “and drank a glass or two of [wine] and took a pipe of tobacco in the presence of forty or more persons; then went home, and continued well all day.”
    * * *

    Sheep to man blood transfusion. Wellcome Library, London.
    For the spectators who jostled one another for a better view of Arthur Coga’s throbbing arm, every element of the scene before them was noteworthy. The experiment itself was new and untested, but the Royal Society’s whole approach to the pursuit of knowledge constituted a much vaster, more important experiment.
    Experiments were something new. The Society’s devotion to this innovative way of probing nature amounted to a call for people to think for themselves. That idea, which seems like the merest common sense to us, struck onlookers at the time as dangerous and obviously misguided.
    It’s always the case that history is a tale told by the victors. But the triumph of the scientific worldview has been so complete that we’ve lost more than the losing side’s version of history. We’ve lost the idea that a view different from ours is even possible. Today we take for granted that originality is a word of praise. New strikes us as nearly synonymous with improved . But for nearly all of human history, a new idea was a dangerous idea. When the first history of the Royal Society was written, in 1667, the author felt obliged to rebut the charge that “to be the Author of new things is a crime.” By that standard, he argued, whoever raised the first house or plowed the first field could have been deemed guilty of introducing a novelty.
    Most people would have agreed with the Spanish ruler Alfonso the Wise, who had once decreed that the only desirable things in this world were “old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to converse with, and old books to read.” The best way to learn the truth, it was often observed, was to see what the authorities of the past had decreed. This was the plainest common sense. To ignore such wisdom in favor of exploring on one’s own was to seek disaster, akin to a foolish traveler’s taking it in his head to fling the captain overboard and grab the ship’s wheel himself.
    Through long centuries the mission of Europe’s great universities had been, in the words of the historian Daniel Boorstin, “not to discover the new but to transmit a heritage.” (In the fourteenth century Oxford University had imposed a rule that “Bachelors and Masters of Arts who do not follow Aristotle’s philosophy are subject to a fine of 5 shillings for each point of divergence.”) The intellectual traits that we esteem today—like independence and skepticism—were precisely those traits that the Middle Ages feared and scorned.
    That deference to authority had religious roots, as did nearly every aspect of medieval life. Good Christians showed their faith partly by their willingness to believe in the unbelievable. In a world riddled with miracles and mysteries, where angels and demons were as real as cats and dogs and where every illness and good harvest showed God’s hand,