blood transfusion Across time and cultures, blood has been seen as the harbinger of death and the giver of life. There is, of course, an empirical explanation for these disparate views: we need blood to live; without it, we die. Yet, even today, blood remains at the center of biology, language, and behavior in a manner that underscores its complexity.
At one level, blood is a bodily fluid that acts as a specialized connective tissue and is composed of blood cells — red, white, and platelets — floating in plasma. At another, ‘blood’ is also a metaphor for kinship (‘blood brothers’), social division (‘blue blood’; ‘bad blood’), and solemn truths (‘blood oath’). Further, blood has long been the preferred substance of sacrifice and other rituals.
Moved between bodies — by bathing, drinking, or transfusing into veins — blood has been used to rejuvenate failing human bodies and souls. This movement, however, has never been a simple one; instead, it has carried with it the complexities of blood itself.
Moved between bodies — by bathing, drinking, or transfusing into veins — blood has been used to rejuvenate failing human bodies and souls. This movement, however, has never been a simple one; instead, it has carried with it the complexities of blood itself.
The history of blood's movement between bodies provides myriad examples of blood's ambiguous cultural status. And, while the history of transfusion opens with a clear vision of blood's purer properties, it unfolds — and some have argued, may even end — with an increasing awareness of its more dangerous dimensions.
The more traditional movement of blood between bodies — through drinking or bathing — rested upon blood's multivalent cultural status, frequently crossing the line between purity and danger. Homer tells of how Odysseus used the blood of goats to substantiate the shades of Hades and force them to speak truthfully to him. In this instance, blood at once reanimates the dead and constrains the nature of their interaction with the living.
The more traditional movement of blood between bodies — through drinking or bathing — rested upon blood's multivalent cultural status, frequently crossing the line between purity and danger. Homer tells of how Odysseus used the blood of goats to substantiate the shades of Hades and force them to speak truthfully to him. In this instance, blood at once reanimates the dead and constrains the nature of their interaction with the living.
This latter capacity of blood-as-truth-serum is a recurrent sub-theme in western thought, found in medieval ideas about consuming blood and later continued in connection with transfusion proper. In George Eliot's mid-19th century tale, The lifted veil, for example, a woman on the verge of death is temporarily revived by a timely transfusion of blood, only to voice ugly truths that effect the fall of her mistress.
Yet it is reanimation itself that is most frequently associated with blood's movement between bodies. In Italy alone, the ancient Romans drank the blood of fallen gladiators to assimilate their vitality; Pope Innocent the VIII was fed the blood of three young boys in a futile effort to prolong his life in 1492; and in 1930, British newspapers announced that Dr Giocondo Protti on the basis of some 2000 experiments had found that blood transfusions from the young rejuvenated the elderly.
Outside Italy, in 16th century Hungary, Countess Elizabeth of Bathory bathed in the blood of hundreds of virgins in an effort to maintain her youthful beauty. Moving blood has also been seen to purify its recipient. The Christian Eucharist calls upon believers to drink the blood of Christ to prepare for entry into heaven. The Victorian novelist Bram Stoker juxtaposed good and evil by having the heroes of Dracula use transfusion to counteract the deadly and damning effects of vampirically induced anemia. In this same vein, the first actual transfusions were in part an effort to purify fallen humanity.
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http://www.oxfordreference.com/pub/views/fact-of-the-day.html?date=2011-09-17
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