Wine is the most remarkable of Medicines. Where Wine is lacking Medicine is necessary.

The Talmud 6th century BCE. Figure 1.

Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International License. Source Wikipedia.

I’m not sure if glass was invented in Mesopotamia but certainly wine was invented there or somewhere nearby, many thousands of years ago. There are other competitors including Iran and Georgia (near Russia), China, Armenia, Syria and Iraq. The precise place where wine was first consumed [1, 2] is thus open to question and its production may have been serendipitous. The question is probably not so important but the common vine in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, is the Vitis Vinifera. It has clearly travelled widely since early times. The Egyptians and certainly the Greeks brought it throughout Europe including France. The Romans introduced Vitis Vinifera to England, the Spanish to South America and from there to California. The Dutch were the instigators in South Africa and the British were very influential in the nineteenth century introducing it to Australia and New Zealand (two of the early producers in Australia were, incidentally, physicians). Whether the anti-oxidants in red wine are protective against cardiovascular disease remains a topic for debate [3].

I certainly am not a scholar of ancient Jewish Literature but the title of this editorial is probably from the Babylonian Talmud circa 500 BCE Fig. 1. It may surprise many of you to know that the Irish had a major influence on wine making in France in the eighteenth century. Why should this be? If you think carefully, many of the well know wines from Bordeaux still have their Irish names, such as Lynch, Kirwan, Barton Gustier (Barton was from Ireland) and the name of the well-known cognac, Hennessy. Hennessy was an officer in Dillon’s regiment in France fighting for the Jacobite side in the Williamite war (Régiment de Dillon was first raised in Ireland in 1688 by Theobald, 7th Viscount Dillon) Fig. 2. It’s a difficult question to answer but it probably was a combination of rebellion, violated treaties, suppression of religion and prohibitive commercial legislation, that made many prominent Irish youth and nobility emigrate to France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was brought into sharp focus for me when speaking with a well-known French stem cell transplanter recently, who had an Irish name, but was completely unaware of its provenance! Another anecdote that comes to mind is when a colleague was on the crew of a flight from Dublin to Lourdes, in France. A passenger requested a drink of ‘Irish brandy’. When my colleague looked somewhat confused the passenger said: yes, the Irish brandy, Hennessy.!

Public Domain. Source Wikipedia.

All was not plain sailing for the Irish, however. Bordeaux was a pre-eminent centre of the wine trade by the early eighteenth century but merchants who were not born within the city’s boundaries were forbidden from carrying on business. As a result, Thomas Barton and several merchants established their homes and warehouses outside the walls of Bordeaux and became known as The Chartronnais (the area in which they lived was on the Quai des Chartrons.

Lest my American readers feel neglected, in the early 1800s a member of the Johnston family (Irish) went to America where his firm accumulated 1000 customers for their French wines across North Eastern America within a short time. According to Ted Murphy, Thomas Jefferson was one of the earliest wine drinkers who insisted that all the wines he ordered had to be bottled at source and his initials etched on each one. He also thought that wines from Chateau d’Yquem [1] were the best he had ever tasted (sweet wines made from botrytised Semillon grapes). Very nice but very expensive.

Where does medicine fit into all this? Well, the same debate could be held about when did medicine begin? Whatever the answer is there a link between medicine and wine? Yes, apparently there is! Medicine, in whatever form, was a feature of ancient civilizations. Early prescriptions can be found on clay Sumerian tablets and Egyptian papyri [4]. Wine was apparently used to treat asthma and epilepsy and on bandages to treat wounds and assist childbirth!

From early years Galen and his theory of the four humours held sway and this was not challenged, in the Western world until 1500 years after his death. The so-called ‘Enlightenment’ seems to have had a great impact on Western Medicine, although the pulmonary circulation had been discovered many years before Harvey’s treatise [1]. Although a number of attempts at blood transfusion were recorded in the UK and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the development of transfusion as we understand it took a number of millennia [4] and some people even thought that blood transfusion would be a good treatment for ‘insanity’. Thankfully blood transfusion, with some disastrous consequences, is now a life-saving procedure.

I am often asked when did haematology become a specialty? Like the origin of wine, it’s a difficult question to answer. William Hewson (1739-1774) an English polymath and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) [5, 6] is often called the ‘father of haematology’ Fig. 3. To claim that anybody was ‘the first’ is always tricky. It is not possible to mention everybody but the development of diagnostic microscopy, staining of blood films, the insights of Virchow and Bennett and the development of the understanding of coagulation and blood transfusion were all seminal achievements. The successful treatment of childhood leukaemia and the subsequent treatment of leukaemia in adults in the late 1970s-early 1980s were landmarks. More recently Don Thomas and George Santos made bone marrow transplantation a reality and now immunotherapy is coming into its own. It should not be forgotten that many innovations were scorned by the establishment before eventually becoming accepted.

Often called the ‘Father of Haematology’. THEBLOODPROJECT.com September 8th 2023.

So, which is older, wine or medicine including haematology remains a topic for discussion, sometimes over a glass of wine!

I am extremely grateful to Ted Murphy whose book ‘A Kingdom of Wine’ was very useful in writing about the Irish diaspora to France in the 18th and 19th centuries.

I am also grateful to Júlio Anselm de Sousa Neto for bringing the quote from the Talmud to my attention.