Transfusion in the new millennium

Prehistoric man left drawings of himself pierced by arrows. This means he was as aware of blood as he was of his own limbs. The flint implements he used as tools and weapons distinguished him from other creatures and contributed to the violence of his era. As he hunted food and fought enemies, he observed bleeding and the properties of blood. A cut, received or inflicted, yielded a vivid red color. If the cut was shallow, there was little blood. But if the cut was deep, a red torrent flowing from the stricken victim quickly led to death, with shed blood congealed and darkening in the sun. Fatal hemorrhage was commonplace. Nonetheless, the sight must have been fearful and possibly existential as life flowed red out of the body of an enemy or a wounded animal. It is no wonder, then, that at the dawn of recorded history, blood was already celebrated in religious rites and rituals as a life-giving force. The cultural expressions of primitive and ancient societies, although separated by time or space, can be strikingly similar. Whether these expressions emerged independently or were diffused about the world by unknown voyagers will probably always remain clouded in mystery. Nonetheless, there is a common thread in the ancient rituals that celebrate blood as a mystical vital principle. In Leviticus 17:11, “the life of the flesh is in the blood,” and the Chinese Neiching (ca. 1000 BC) claims the blood contains the soul. PreColumbian North American Indians bled their bodies “of its greatest power” as self-punishment, Egyptians took blood baths as a recuperative measure, and Romans drank the blood of fallen gladiators in an effort to cure epilepsy. The Romans also practiced a ceremony called taurobolium—a blood bath for spiritual restoration. A citizen seeking spiritual rebirth descended into a pit, or fossa sanguinis. Above him on a platform, a priest sacrificed a bull, and the animal’s blood cascaded down in a shower upon the beneficiary. Then, in a powerful visual image, the subject emerged up from the other end of the pit, covered with blood and reborn. The legend of Medea and Aeson taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and quoted in Bulfinch’s Mythology 5 also ascribed rejuvenating powers to blood. Jason asked Medea to “take some years off his life and add them to those of his father Aeson.”Medea, however, pursued an alternative course. She prepared a cauldron with the blood of a sacrificed black sheep. To this, she added magic herbs, hoarfrost gathered by moonlight, the entrails of a wolf, and many other things “without a name.” The boiling cauldron was stirred with a withered olive branch, which became green and full of leaves and young olives when it was withdrawn. Seeing that all was ready, Medea cut the throat of the old man and let out all his blood, and poured into his mouth and into his wound the juices of her cauldron. As soon as he had imbibed them, his hair and beard laid by their whiteness and assumed the blackness of youth; his paleness and emaciation were gone; his veins were full of blood, his limbs of vigour and robustness. Aeson is amazed at himself and remembers that such as he now is, he was in his youthful days, 40 years before.