In Our Time - Blood

Episode Date: May 22, 2003

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss blood. For more than 1500 years popular imagination, western science and the Christian Church colluded in a belief that blood was the link between the human and the divine. The Greek physician, Galen, declared that it was blood that contained the force of life and linked the body to the soul, the Christian Church established The Eucharist – the taking of the body and blood of Christ. In our blood was our individuality, it was thought, our essence and our blood lines were special. Transfusion threatened all that and now itself is being questioned.Why is it that blood was used to define both man and messiah? And how has the tradition of blood in religious thought been affected by the progress of medicine?With Miri Rubin, Professor of European History at Queen Mary, University of London; Dr Anne Hardy, Reader in the History of Medicine at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London; Jonathan Sawday, Professor of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, for more than 1,500 years, popular imagination, Western science and the Christian church colluded in a belief that blood was the link between the human and the divine. The Greek physician, Galen, declared that it was blood that contained the force of life and linked the body to the soul. The Christian Church established the Eucharist, the taking of the body and blood of Christ. In our blood was our individuality, it was thought, our essence, and our blood lines were special. Transfusion threatened all that, and now itself is being questioned.

Why is it that blood was used to define both man and Messiah, and how has the tradition of blood in religious thought been affected by the progress of medicine? with me to discuss the oxygen bearer that courses through our culture are Anne Hardy, reader in the history of medicine, at the Welcome Trust Centre at University of College London, Jonathan Sorday, Professor of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde, and Mirabh, Professor of European History at Queen Mary, University of London. Mirabin, before we come to the early Christian church,

can you tell us what the religious attitudes towards blood were within Judaism? Judaism has a total horror of the use, the mundane use of blood. In blood courses the spirit, the life power, which is God-given. And it's an economy into which humans should not really at all intervene. But there is some use of blood in very particular ritual context, that is, by the priest at the temple, as they sacrifice animals, they can sprinkle blood, they can daub various ritual artifacts in blood. There's even the use of blood in the process. of perhaps healing lepers, but on the whole, most people should not use blood in the normal course of their lives. I mean, if they prick their thumb, they can suck it, okay, but not

cook with it. And therefore, there's a whole elaborate ritual process by which blood is removed, removed from the sort of mundane, day-to-day trivializing use of people. So it's there, it's in the temple. And this is, of course, the world out of which Christianity grew, where there's an elaborate system, an extremely complex system, laid down, of course, in the Pentateuch, in the Bible, in Deuteronomy, in Leviticus, of exactly how to use blood, to remove blood, to sprinkle blood from the animals offered at the temple. But it's in that very, very careful context that blood is used publicly and symbolically. How far was it a reaction to sacrifice, human and animal sacrifice, both of which we find in the Old Testament?

well the threat to sacrifice, Abraham's threat to sacrifice his son and sacrifice of animals and so and so forth. How far was Judaism a reaction to and how far a continuation of that? Well, that's, of course, extremely interesting. And Abraham is perhaps exactly the turning point, as Hegel was later at Kant to comment upon. It's the point when, in a way, the Jewish people cut themselves off, as it were, from those near-eastern practices, indeed, of human sacrifice.

And they start moving towards something that, comes in its place. And by the time we're talking of sort of the beginning of our era, the beginning of the first millennium, there is an elaborate sequence of offering that you offered your God to expiate because the God can be vengeful. But it's animals, it's pure animals, cattle, sheep, and so on in very, very particular ways. So we have this situation where blood has a special but very limited part to play in Jewish ritual, not so much limited. They're strictly censored almost, isn't it? Exactly.

How does the Christian attitude towards blood come out of that? We have the crucifixion. We have the blood of Christ. We have the wound in the side, where the wound from the hands and the feet and so on and so forth. So we have blood in the resurrection, which is the key point in Christianity. How does that develop its own form and ritual and meaning

out of Judaism and then in its own context? Well, there is really one of the great dramas of Western culture, this extraordinary struggle over the meanings of blood. Because on the one hand, Christianity is totally born out of this Jewish world. On the other hand, Christ wants to reject, or at least those who interpret his message in the following decades and centuries, invest a lot of effort in exactly separating and saying all those minute conventions and ritual, rules and so on, are exactly over

because now grace has come into the world. We need no longer be preoccupied with all the tiny details of a vengeful God and how to expiate him, because now God has revealed himself through this extraordinary sacrifice of his son, which is a sacrifice of love, of love, not of blood. But as you've just said, it is exactly imaged and imagined through an extraordinary, painful, sorrowful, appalling unmaking of a body of a man. If it is possible to summarize, let's try to do it.

What is the essential difference between the Jewish view of blood and what becomes the Christian view of blood? The Christian view of blood, the religious message around Christian blood, is that it is an emanation. It is something that you can think about and look at in some very, very limited contexts, receive as an image and as a gift of love from a saving God, not a God that you have to fear, but a God that is given himself totally as a man in order to save humanity. The very notion that God can become man is absolutely appalling to Jews.

And on that is based the new Christian mission. Love through pain, through self-sacrifice, not the sacrifice of animals. At the same time, in about the second century, as blood is becoming very important in Christian faith, particularly the martyrs and so on. We have in Rome, Galen, the Greek physician, who lays down a view, a medical view, a scientific, we might call it now, medical view of blood, which extraordinarily obtains for the next 1,500 years, more or less to all intents of purposes, unchallenged. Now, what was that?

Galen's view of blood derives really from the humeral system, which was established by the Hippocratic corpus, which came before Galen. and the Hippocratic corpus defines the human body as being composed of four humours, four fluids, blood, bile, black bile and phlegm. And with these, for Galen, blood is the most important because blood is at once a nutritive force and also a life force. Galen developed his ideas about the humeral system by animal experimentation he dissected animals. And so he was able to marry up the theoretical disposition of the humours.

to what was going on in the anatomy of the animal body. So for Galen, blood is made in the liver, which is the nutritive organ, and from there it travels in dark purple form to the heart. And in the heart, it undergoes this magical transformation. It acquires energy, it acquires life, it turns bright red, it becomes arterial blood, which then passes on to the rest of the body, because for Galen blood, it's a one-way process, and the blood is consumed within the body.

It doesn't travel. It's a one-way process. So it's a life force. Can you tell me what he meant by life force? Miri has been discussing the sort of divine place of blood almost, or the religious, some people would say the divine place of blood in Judaism and in Christianity. Now what about the life force that Gailin is talking about here? Well, I think it's much more mystical. It's something that happens as blood passes through the heart. And part of the blood there, of course, goes up, the small part of blood goes up to the brain

and is translated into perception. But what happens to blood in the heart is it becomes a life-giving force and energy-giving force. It's energy, really. Jonathan Sodor. I think it's interesting. A phrase that Anne used there as magic, the idea that the blood being some sort of magical,

and in fact, both what Miri and Anne have said, have kind of stressed this kind of non-materialist nature of blood. Aristotle tends to see things as having a kind of a circular process. and tends to see things as working analogously so that if you think about the way in which the body is organized into its humours, into its kind of constituent parts, Aristotle, Aristotelian ways of thinking would suggest that the body is also mirroring in some way the world

and that the world is organized in a very, very similar fashion. So whereas where the world has processes, has seasons, has the passage of time and so on, an Aristotelian looking at the body would say, well, what is it in the world that also has processes, has kind of circular motions and what have you? But the interesting, or the kind of curious thing there is that for all that love of circles that you discover

or progression, a sort of circular progression that you find in Aristotle, nobody comes up before the 17th century with an idea of circulation of the blood. As you say, as Anne was saying, Galenic views of the blood are, it's essentially a one-wave, a flow, but it's not a circular flow. And what's being conveyed in the body,

in the Galenic view. It's very difficult for us to put our finger on it, but whether it's some sort of sense of the soul, it's a kind of notion of what it is that makes us human, resides in some way in the blood. And that is why it's so crucial that blood turns into semen, for example. Blood turns intermenstrual blood and women,

which, when they're pregnant, turns into milk. So blood is actually just the beginning of a sort of strange story of human experience and life cycle change and change over time. It's not sort of this sort of red thing that we can measure and so on and know exactly how it's constituted, because it is a force. It transmutes itself as necessary,

and therefore it has enormous potential for, you know, to being something that you read meanings into. Why do you think that Galen's views had purchased for so long? We're talking about 1,500 years, where I'm sure they were challenged along the way, perhaps in other than Western Wales, perhaps in the Arabic world. Well, there is a very good example, actually, the Arabic challenge to it, because, I mean, we tend to think of the discovery.

circulation of the blood as being a kind of Renaissance or a late Renaissance phenomena associated with people like Harvey and in Spain rather servetus. In actual fact, I think that the first observation of what became known as pulmonary circulation took place in the 13th century in Arabic medicine. And to answer your question, Melvin, there's a way you've got to, I think, start thinking about the way in which scientific knowledge has kind of itself developed and how a certain view of the world has developed which becomes scientific. But we tend to think of the

Arabic commentators, and to use that very term commentators is also to sort of suggest a way in which knowledge is being organised. We tend to think of them as simply transmitters of knowledge, from the Greeks and the Romans, down to the great flowering, the Renaissance and so on. In actual fact, it's a kind of rather odd picture

of medical history, I think. I mean, they were great contributors. And can we talk about, Anne Hennie, can we talk about that practical application of Galen's ideas? We We know about the fondness for leeches in medicine. What was the theory behind bleeding, though? The theory behind bleeding is complicated.

Because blood is a nutrient, you can have too much of it. And the idea of letting blood is to release the pressures in the body, to release the overflow of nutrients, if you like. But blood is also seen as an exciting substance. When you look at fevers, there's supposed to be an excess of blood there and an excess of rather excitable blood. let it in order to calm the patient down. And so they don't get a rush of blood to the head?

Something like that. But in fact, it is a medical fact that if you lose blood, your temperature drops. So in fact, there is a medical reason for letting blood in fevers. But because blood carries connotations of so many other things, it becomes standard practice to let blood for just about any physical discomfort. I'm going to say that goes back in a sense to nature. and the observation of phenomenal light nosebleeds the fact of menstruation

and that menstruation can be seen to ease discomfort in women if you've got haemorrhoids and they bleed, it eases your discomfort. So to ease bodily discomforts, you bleed. And of course, what's interesting is that, again, because it's about blood, it had such potential to turn into something more than that. So, for example, in the regular routine

of bloodletting in a monastery in the Middle Ages and even later, this would be turned not just into a medical event, but also a particular event when your blood is being let, there has other meanings as well, you're thinking of Christ, you're thinking about the relation of your soul to your body and so on. So a lot of these points that arise from the commitment to a particular medical system were so rich reverberation, like everything around blood,

that a lot more could be made of these, as it were, purely medical events, and we're done. And not just religious, but almost pagan in a sense, because in the medieval world, bloodletting was related to the phases of the moon, to the equinoxes. In popular usage right into the 19th and the early 20th century, a country people very often let blood twice a year in the spring and in the autumn because those were the times when it was felt that there was an excess of blood in the body and that it needed to be let to improve your general health and well-being.

We're talking of this as an extraordinarily widespread practice over an extraordinary number of centuries is perhaps one of the, you'll have to tell me, John, one of the principal ways of curing a great number of things as to let blood. Dabbling with blood is the way to get people. But in fact, I mean, it goes even deeper than that in a way. The old English word for a doctor is lecher, a leech. So the means of extracting blood,

the kind of animal that takes away, the slug-like thing that takes away, actually becomes sort of synonymous with the whole medical profession for a thousand years. But how did they take those? understand it, leeches were used for the face and for the genitalia, but blood was let in otherwise. Also, it was cut? I mean, veins would be, is it veins or arteries? I'm never quite sure of this, but, but, but, but, the vein would be, vein would be cut and what, what interests me about this in a way is, did people feel, I mean, if, if you give blood now, afterwards, you feel faint and you get the kind of, you know, the cup of tea and a biscuit. Absolutely. Sorry, perfect. All right. Did people feel better? Yes, and that is why, well, it's very interesting. They first feel faint, and that's why they get special allowances of

treats and snacks and special foods on the days when there's bloodletting. There are special budgets in monastic accounts for bloodletting days, and they're actually transferred from the normal dormitory of the monks to an infirmary where they can get delicate special foods, particularly meat, in a way to return the iron into the body and to feed them up. So this is absolutely understood as an economy. But it's a absolutely fascinating example, it seems to me, of a sort of, mass self-conviction.

You could even say hypnosis, you could even say delusion, because as you said, Jonathan, when people give a lot of blood, they often feel faint, and on the whole, if you give too much body, it doesn't do you much good at all. And yet, people, there's entering Peep's diary,

he has his bloodlet, he lies down and feels faint for a while, then he pays the chap five shillings, and all as well. Families had blood, blood, so they just ignored the fact that they felt weaker off. I think what's interesting here is that the perception becomes a cultural perception is perhaps

that feeling faint is a sign of feeling good. Feeling faint is a sign of actually feeling healthy. That's how you should feel at that moment. And it's part of, if you like, the redemptive process, the process by which you regain your health, is to go through this kind of particular phase, consequent on blood being taken from you. And there is a principle in the medicine of the period,

which is curing through contradiction. So it's not too surprising to people that you do. You go in one direction to achieve actually the opposite. You go in one direction to achieve actually the opposite. It's a very, very strong principle in medical force. That was a principle, in fact, set out by Galen that developed the system of the principle of opposites. Was there along the way in these 15?

Was there any opposition? Did anybody stand up and say, look, I don't think this is doing me much good, and you did it to my father, and he sort of died of the bloodletting. And did any, were there any, was there any academic opinion or any sort of opinion saying this might not be working?

I think it comes after Harvey, doesn't it? So it's as late as that? It's his latest that. Well, do you do you have cases of malpractice? even in the Middle Ages where somebody complains about a doctor for not so the concept that people could have some sort of critical and, you know, purchase upon these traditional treatments. I'm sure it's there in any period and we just don't know enough about it. It might be sort of along the lines of you haven't let enough blood or you've let too much blood. Presumably the lack of a challenge to this sort of orthodoxy is partly due to the fact that the kind of worldview that people have would literally have to be overthrown in order to kind of take on the specific.

case, you know, which is quite different from medical malpractices. Absolutely. I mean, that's one of the fascinating things. We've got the reality, you've got the sort of mindset, the world mindset, but also in parallel, which I'd like to come back to, is the religious development. We have the Lateran Council in 1215 and the elevation of the Eucharist in the Christian church, the Eucharist being in this case, transubstantiation, that what you are being offered has been changed at the altar by the host has been changed, and it's now the body and blood of Christ.

and you're drinking his blood and eating his body. Now, how did that, as it were, come into effect, Miriam? What were the consequences of that? It's an extraordinary story, really, because in early Christianity, I mean, obviously there is the Last Supper and that is very clearly there in Scripture, in the Gospels Christ, it's at the paschal meal, and he turns it into a moment of suggesting something new

will come out of this and also foretelling his death, so that the bread and the wine foretelling. or presaid the body and blood. But in early Christianity, Christians sort of got together and they had a meal in commemoration. There was nothing, anything so specific as the distinct ritual of the mass as developed by the 12th and 13th centuries,

as you say, is legislated for all Christians everywhere in 1215. And that is a long and interesting process, but from about the 11th century, the church is sort of really evaluating a lot of the procedures and rituals around it. and it sort of settles amongst all the sacraments, seven sacrams, you know, baptism confirmation and so on, upon the Eucharist as really the central one

within which is enfolded the core narrative of Christianity. That a God gave himself really suffered on the cross, which is extraordinary, and has left this legacy of grace that anybody who comes and participates and partakes in the mass as a good Christian believing it properly can share in that saving grace. They can share in it through blood. actually back to pre-Juda. We are indeed back to it. But the beauty, I say so the beauty of the design of the Eucharist is that it asks people not to do anything abhorrent like, you know, drinking blood or anything of the kind. Indeed, theologians who discuss it say it has to be something innocuous like a little white wafer biscuit and a drink of wine because otherwise we will be laughed at, say, Christians are cannibals. This is literally the words that are used.

A lot of the Christians in the 11th century objected to this idea of France of Sanctuary. A massive debate about it. Exactly all the objections that you can imagine, theologians saying this is disgusting, this is far too literal. Nowhere in the gospel is this decree. Nonetheless, the theologians, the papacy, the sort of emergence, very strong Christian establishment, the church with the capital C, settle on a ritual that literally, if carefully designed, it'll look the same all over Christianity. wherever you go, you know you're traveling, you enter a different parish, you see the same beautiful reiteration confirming the same truth everywhere at the altar. It doesn't look like it, but you know it's there. And occasionally there are stories of miracles where a priest doubts or somebody isn't quite convinced.

And of course, then eruptions of blood do follow from the Eucharist to prove the point. One of the things that is fascinating, this is just a small thing, I suppose, is the altar itself, because in early Christian churches I understood it, partly because they were outsiders. They met some or other as a group, but the idea of the altar, the sacrificial altar, where is a pagan notion, that that was where you slaughtered the beasts

and one presumes at certain times, perhaps certainly in other cultures, prisoners, children and so on, Jonathan. Which is why in the Reformation, particularly in Britain, you get this kind of what seems to us like a bizarre argument, but is a ferocious argument amongst Protestants, as to whether or not the altar is an altar, whether it's a table.

Yes. And one suggests a meal, the last supper, and suggests a kind of a pattern of remembrance, of symbolic remembrance, if you like, of the last supper. The other is the sacrificial, is exactly a spilling of blood. It goes transubstantiation to the commemorative, which is the commemorative, which is back to what it was before,

let us say, 1215. Which is Protestantism, an attempt at kind of referring back to that primitive, if you like, purity. But does the coming in of blood to the center of what became, for those few hundred years after, 12, 15, until projectism got underway. The key in dominating and demanding

faith of Western Europe, is there any coincidence there between the medical history and the religious fact of the Eucharist? That's an interesting one. They definitely used the same terms. They definitely use the same Aristotelian terms that are used to describe the body

are used to describe what happens in the Eucharist. The same terms about the substance and appearance, the terms that they learn in the schools. And it's very interesting, which reconfirms what we said earlier, about a worldview, is that the theologians and the doctors and the lawyers, in fact, speak the same language, the language of this Aristotelian worldview and categories by which you describe the world. So after 1215, the job for theologians is actually how to describe transubstantiation

in Aristotelian terms and to keep it there. I think I'm still pondering that. It's a very tricky question in that, but I suppose one answer. to this kind of division of knowledge, if you like, is that you can't think in the period prior to the 16th century. You can't really think of, say, a medical image on its own. Any image is also saying something religious. You can't, as it were, divorce the world, you know.

So you might have a kind of a diagram of a kind of, you know, a venal man, i.e. a sort of thing displaying a system of veins and arteries, a picture displaying a system of veins and arteries. But the figures, gestures will probably be speaking of heavenly things at the same time. So the difficulty in answering that question is that it's a new mindset that we have where we divide up knowledge into certain realms, into certain categories. Well, we've talked about the religious side of the mindset

and Luther bringing in a new idea of the Eucharist and so on, but let's come to the medical side again with Anne Hardy, the Great Break with Gail. I know something's happening in the 13th century, but let's use this as a staging person. The Englishman William Hardy, who studied a lot in Italy, and he described the circulation of the body in six. 1628, and about 30 years later, about the time of his death, it took that long, he became more generally accepted.

How did he come across, Anne, how did he come across this, how did he discover this, what experiments he used to discover this, and what was it he actually discovered then? Well, as you say, Harvey studied in Italy at Padua, which was the great centre of medical education in the 16th century. and before Harvey's time, Andreas Vassalius had published his seven volume, beautifully illustrated anatomy of the human body, in which he established a new way of looking at the body, which he had achieved through dissection again. But unlike the ancients, Vesalius had dissected both human and animal cadavers, and he therefore set up a comparative, it was a father of comparative anatomy,

and that is what William Harvey picks up on when he goes to Padilla. And in the years after he returns from Padua, he dissects and dissects and dissects. He dissected 40 different species of animals, including humans, in order to try and establish how blood worked in the body. Because Veselius before him and Harvey himself noted discrepancies between what went on in human cadavers and what went on in animal cadavers. And because Galen had only worked with animals, he got things wrong as far as humans were concerned. So this sets up Harvey's question. And Harvey then, through the processes of comparative dissection, develops a theory, and it's a theory about the circulation of the blood and the human body,

which he tests. He tests the action of the heart as a pump driving blood around the body by forcing water through the heart of a cadaver. And he is able to establish to everybody's his own satisfaction and eventually the satisfaction of others that the heart acts as a pump driving blood around the body. Given that Hardy produced this book, in the face of as it were 1,500 years of people believing in something else. It must have seemed at the time to people quite radical, almost off the radar,

what were they to make of this? It was just a... Well, how was it received... Was it in its time? It did take about 25 to 30 years, but even in its time, was it deeply resented and rejected, or was it welcomed as an illumination? Well, it's a bit of both.

I mean there had been indications previously that Galen was not right in his analysis what the blood did so there was in a sense a sort of preparation there before Harvey but yes there were people who rejected him and it took as you say time to filter through and it's not until the 1670s that it really becomes generally accepted it's interesting that the first move it makes

outside the medical area seems to me to be into politics Harvey is very close to James I and Charles I first But Hobbes takes up his ideas And it drives into politics I mean Harvey's The paradox is that Harvey is a political And intellectual and social conservative So for the kind of the discoverer of the circulation

This kind of radical overthrowing of an old idea He's actually a very kind of Aristotelian kind of character Which leads you into thinking about why it is that he himself starts investigating circles And circular motions Well, because Aristotle is interested in circles. So first kind of paradox, Harvey is actually an Aristotelian in certain ways. It's not looking to overthrow anything.

The second thing is that it does, the whole doctrine of circulation has a political force to it. The first edition of DeMocchutus, the 1628 edition, is dedicated to Charles, to Charles I. And the analogy, the dedication roughly, Harvey writes, goes something like, just as you in the state are heart, your majesty. So my little book is discovering how you really are a heart in the state because my book is about the circulation of the blood and how the heart drives that forward. So there you've got, as it were, medical science and political symbolism coming together in some way.

But then what happens in 1649, the English Revolution, the king's decapitated, the wrong word is the heart is being torn out of the state in some measure. Harvey reacts to it very interestingly because there's a second edition of DeMoccius that comes out after the execution of Charles I, which is the first English edition. And Harvey's presented with, if you like, a tense problem. I can't any longer say that you are at the heart of the state because we have a state and it's still operating,

but there's no heart in it. So he says, well, all I'm saying in the dedication now is that so people used to compare hearts and princes. This used to be the system that operated. Harvey was very, very connected to Charles I mean, he involved Charles I first in his dissections, in looking at his dissections and so on. And this overthrow, if you like, of the king,

one wonders how it kind of breaks into medicine in other ways. For example, the idea of the body having a hierarchy in which the heart is the chief organ. Very medieval idea. Very medieval idea. But after you, as it were, seen a state operate without a hierarchy of that kind, without a monarch, a sovereign, then I wonder if the body is being kind of reorganized in certain ways.

But then the hierarchy quite soon, changes with the brain. To the brain. The brain becomes the boss, as it were. It does. But before we go back to that, merely, just to try to keep the medical, the political, and the religious employment,

how did the papacy react to this new idea of the circulation of the blood? Did it have an effect on Christian thought? I mean, it's quite interesting, because it's easy to compare this sort of with the case of Galileo, for example. And I think that relatively, as you both suggested, I think, there wasn't the same sort of problem as there was because I don't think that this impinged in the same sort of way on a whole set of categories inherited from Aristotle

and it was much easier to live with. It was also coming from somewhere else that wasn't coming from the heart of Italian peninsular thought and circles very close to the papacy as well. So in a strange sort of way, it's a much more sort of English, Northwest European affair. Is that fair to say? Well, yeah, I mean the whole sort of focus

of medical research had moved from Padua at the time that Hardy was working to the Protestant North. But the word that we've got, we haven't used yet, but the really important word in all this is the word mechanism. What Harvey establishes is the heart is a kind of valve system. And what the blood is doing is flowing through the body in

a mechanical fashion. It's not divine, it's not to do with the soul any longer. All of that has been kind of thrown out. And we're beginning to think about the body now in terms of dynamics, in terms of blood pressure, in terms of a machine. And that's the radical. That's probably in a way more radical than Yes, it loses its mystique, in fact.

And blood itself lose something of its mysticism, and it's magic and mystery. Can I just move quite a bit forward? Because blood, with Gaelan, it's to do with the essence of life. With the Eucharist, it's to do with the essence of eternal life. And bleeding is to do with the essence of health and so on. And we have ideas of blood lines, I am in the line of his blood, the genealogies of blood, a race is a blood race, and blood this and blood.

It's absolutely still completely infests our language today. It's in the blood, it's in the... We get transfusion when we get proper hypodermic needles and so on, which means that your blood can be my blood tomorrow morning, and so on. This changes the philosophy radically, doesn't it? It changes the idea of it being the essence. of an individual to have his or her own blood,

there being a clean, clear, unpolluted bloodline. All this is changed. Absolutely. Who wants the bat first? Vampires. Vampires. As soon, I mean, as you were saying that, I was thinking about vampires.

I mean, the 19th century, late 19th century phenomenon of kind of, you know, worries about decline, degeneration, about purity. And of course, the phrase racial purity comes into play here. And all of that seems to get sort of, sort of centralized or kind of focused. in that Bram Stoker story, which is about a kind of an alien infectious creature

who was able to transmit infection via the blood who turns up from the east and focuses on the unlikely place of Whitby to start kind of, as it were, investigating degeneration of the kind through the blood. Yes. Another interesting way of looking at it is also the really famous book by Richard Titmus, The Gift Relationship, that is,

what is the appropriate economy, what the appropriate system to try, treat blood as a commodity. Is it that we should structure it, we should pay people for blood and so on, like any other very precious thing, like gold or whatever, or like knowledge? Or is it something so ineffable, so special that it is best actually to leave it in the domain of gift giving. People should volunteer.

It should be the people, you know, they give it because they want to and you get both better blood, as it were, from better people. This is a very, very complicated business. But it seems to me that for me what I want to take away from this globalization of blood is that the health of every creature on this planet becomes absolutely an intimate issue for you and me and all of us because their blood may course in our veins. Yes. But that transformation only happens during the Second World War when you get organized blood transfusion,

organized blood banks. When blood becomes a commodity, a sense of commodity, you take it out and you store it and you can distribute it to millions. So when we've seen the transformations, you know, from Galen to Harvey, you go to the Second World War when that blood becomes common, common to mankind in a sense, although not all that common, because you have to remember the blood groups. And yes, you can use O group blood on anybody,

but you can't use A and B group blood on anybody, so there's still a faint distinction there. But it's only faint. And I forgot to say blood groups. The blood groups came in at the end of the 19th century with a hypodemic needle, and this enabled the transatlantic. but the transfusion has changed things radically, as Mary was pointing out, in all sorts of ways. But the lingering, the lingering effect of the blood, it's still massively in our culture now.

I mean, in the last century, in parts of many parts of the world, a white person would not want, as it were, black blood. And totally ridiculous, but they would not have wanted, and great methods of obstruction and just as well worked out as the very early Judeic church. These patterns and things must be drained away and put in that direction. And now, of course, there's a business of blood can carry infection. That in the blood bank might be blood from people who have infections in their blood. Not only AIDS, all sorts of other blood infections. Well, all sorts of other. Hepatitis, it is the other one.

And, of course, it was really only with AIDS that this whole idea became popularised. And now, of course, as soon as a new disease appears, there's an immediate scare about whether or not it's carried in the blood, like new variant CJD, and in the States and in Australia, they won't accept blood from people who have been to Britain just in case. The early stages of AIDS, that the French, for instance, would accept blood from French persons, but not because French persons had necessarily pure blood,

but not French persons, they were a bit dodgy, so it wouldn't accept that blood, haven't it? Is that an instance of the metaphor being so, like the metaphor of bloodline, purity of blood, etc., being so kind of deeply embedded that we can't, actually get out of the metaphor, even if the science is taking us into a new place. Yes, and even science was reluctant to recognise that blood played a role in the transmission of AIDS. I mean, there's two or three crucial years in the early 80s when even the scientists

couldn't take it on board and couldn't. Because the culture was so strong, do you think? Yes, I think so. And the kind of implication, the medical implications were horrendous. So they dare and face up to it? Yeah, they couldn't. And do you think the Australians not wanting a... British blood because we might be mad coward. Do you think that is sensible? I don't think there's...

Well, it may well be, but there's no evidence so far. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. Is that kind of worry, though? It tends to, if there isn't. I mean, one gets a bit sort of bored with scientists saying there's no evidence at all, but it might happen, which has caused more confusion than enough in this country over the last 15 years. That's a very scientific answer, though, isn't it? I mean, there's never a yes or no.

No, no, not, not, no, no, no, to the end of the 17th to be. bit of paper, worn evidence that it might happen. It's, you know, a bomb could drop through this ceiling. But, you know, ultimately, doesn't you think that it goes back to where we started, the whole issue of the basis of community? And blood is something that we all cherish, that we can share and save each other. And isn't this a base for a sort of renewed sense of global responsibility, don't you think? I think, I know, I take a different line on this. I go back to the idea of blood being a thing that comes from a part.

part that worries you. Maybe this is because I'm a chap, maybe because I'm a guy. I'm thinking of Keats seeing blood on his pillow and writing to his friend and saying, you know what this means, or of Kafka spitting blood in a swimming bath and being instantly aware that this is a sign of real disturbance, that the interior world, which is usually hidden, reserved, kept from us, has suddenly broken out into the open, and we're reminded of our mortality. And I think that's one of the things that blood does. It reminds us of our mortality. which does take you back to the Christian and Judaic line. But I don't see this community in quite the same way.

There's evidence for merit. There's anecdotal evidence for Mirage is quite interesting. After the September 11th business in New York, people queued up to give blood. And they all got, they said, obviously, what is needed now is our blood. And it was both obviously the physical act, because I should imagine America as well stocked with reserves,

but it was also the... A gesture. It was the... Yes. And there's people in New York who wouldn't meet, you know, over any... In any social way? New York is giving.

Absolutely. New York is giving. Is there anything, finally to bring this towards the close, is there anything remaining in the way we think about blood now? I mean, you three think about blood now, anything remaining of its longer history, anything remaining of Galen's thought and ideas, in the way we think about now,

has that gone completely, the bleeding, the notion and so on? I think it's gone. I think it's gone. I think it's been gone for some time, some centuries. It started going after Harvey, in this century it has gone because we've got a much more scientific conception of how blood works and how it develops. I'm thinking, yes, I think that's right,

but I think there has been one sort of area where people have tried to, as it were, reclaim blood in that older way, and that's in the realm of the arts. In particular, I'm thinking about body artists, Franco B, and so on, people who have used their own kind of fluids, blood from blood being one of the most important, to kind of make a statement, which somehow does seem to me be redolent of an older way of thinking.

What is the statement by making? I'm not sure. I think it's sacramental or sacrificial. I think it's to do with something about looking back to, you know, the giving of blood or the letting of blood or the flowing of blood in a kind of an older, if you like, Christian, sacrificial way. I think it's a confused statement, actually, sometimes. Sometimes it's just there simply to shock and it takes us back to the idea of, you know, this is stuff in the wrong place. We shouldn't be looking at blood shaped into the head, into the artist's head or something.

But, I mean, don't you see martyrdom coming back? for example, in the rituals of martyrdom, certain sects we saw in Karbalah, just a week after the end of the war, men flagellating themselves, walking in the streets as a badge of identity and so on, let alone the whole language of martyrdom that emerges from other parts of the world. So it seems to me blood is always that sort of essence of what you're willing to give. Your body is really what you have to offer. In contexts of sort of radical commitment, that's what you give. And in that sense, as long as there are causes that will animate people, blood, as it public statement will be there. But finally, might we be

coming back to, or coming to an idea of the individual's blood being the sacred thing for the individual? I mean, one can look at it as not in terms of inherited illnesses through the world, but also, if we are going to get if we're going to get blood tanks, blood reservoirs, of which

there are great doubts because of various diseases, might the next step be, look, you, Jonathan, are only going to, you're going to give blood But for yourself, for when you're ill, you've got your 12 pints ready in the fridge. That is happening already. And particularly in the States, people will donate their own blood before they have the operation.

So that they can be transfused only with their own blood. That's actually going back, isn't it? It is going back in a way, a sad statement about that. Mirri's earlier comment about a kind of blood, linking us together into a community. We're atomized, as it were now, it seems. I mean, you know, in the 1980s is the advice to people. people travelling in Russia was not quite take your own blood, but certainly take the implements with which blood will be let.

I mean, you have that advice when you travel in Africa these days. Ideally, you take your own blood with you. There you go. In our beginnings and our ends. Well, thank you very much to Anne Hardy, to Jonathan Sorday, and to Miri Rubin. And thank you for listening. Next week we'll be talking about the science of memory.

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