Blood (30 page)

Let's imagine that we are still roaming the planet two centuries from now, writing books, designing buildings, making love, combing the nits out of children's hair, dethroning corrupt politicians, paddling canoes, and being seduced by the Northern Lights. Let's say that we have not succumbed to complete and utter folly and exterminated ourselves through war, environmental destruction, or disease. If we do survive as a species for another two hundred years — enough time for our next six generations of descendants to be born and to procreate — we will surely look back with a certain amusement and astonishment at how humans were thinking about blood today.

Looking back, we will be no less amused and horrified than we are now when we remember that as recently as the eighteenth century, a French physician was trying to calm a man's psychiatric disorders by transfusing the blood of a calf into him. Just imagine how people may speak of us, in the future.
There was this thing called leukemia
, people might say.
They had the insane idea of blasting the body with toxins and damn near killing a person, and then replacing the bone marrow so that the body could manufacture an entirely new batch of blood. It was not until the year 2079 that a scientist by the name of Artemisia Peters of Zambia discovered that instead of x, y, z, all one had to do was a, b, c. And it was not until the year 2124 that the Chinese physician Ling Xiabo was awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering how to create safe, effective artificial blood that ended up eliminating the need for human blood transfusions.

Who knows what we will know in two hundred years? None of us will be around to see it. But we are still likely to be thinking about our blood, not just as a function of our health and vitality, but also in regard to how it defines us in our families and countries, and in our personal and collective identities. Who do we descend from? Who do we belong to? What do we hope to transmit to our children and grandchildren, and to their offspring? How does blood come to be associated with truth and integrity? Will we ever transcend the nasty tendency to tumble into depravity by vilifying as impure the blood of the ones we most fear or revile? We have nobody but ourselves to blame for these lapses in humanity. There is nothing but our own biases blocking the way to a path that allows us to enjoy blood as a metaphor for our distinctiveness and group belonging, without using it as an excuse to pillory the most convenient scapegoat. Blood, I hope, will eventually unite us. Blood fills our imaginations just as fully as it fills our veins. Thus it has always been, and will always be.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

(All page number references refer to the print edition)

CHAPTER 1

PAGE 13: “DISOBEDIENCE” BY A. A. MILNE

I have quoted the opening lines of A. A. Milne's poem “Disobedience,” in
When We Were Very Young
(Methuen & Co., 1924).

PAGES 13–24: THE NATURE AND FUNCTIONS OF BLOOD

Sarah Levete,
Understanding the Human Body: Understanding the Heart, Lungs and Blood
(Rosen Publishing Group, 2010). It never hurts to start with a book for children.

Volume 1 of Justice Horace Krever's
Report of the Commission of Inquiry on the Blood System in Canada,
tabled in 1997.

Alistair Farley, Charles Hendry, and Ella McLafferty, “Blood Components,”
Nursing Standard,
November 28 – December 4, 2012.

Jacques-Louis Binet,
Le sang et les hommes
(Gallimard, 2001). See the photos on the first pages, which show how quickly blood clots after a vein has been cut.

The
PBS
web page “Red Gold: The Epic Story of Blood”
offers a wealth of physical and historical facts at
www.pbs.org/wnet/redgold/index.html
.

For notions of the four humours advanced by Hippocrates, Galen, and others, see: Noga Arikha,
Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours
(Ecco, 2008), and Sherwin B. Nuland's review “Bad Medicine,”
New York Times Book Review,
July 8, 2007.

PAGES 24–28: BLOODLETTING

Gerry Greenstone, “The History of Bloodletting,”
B.C. Medical Journal
, January/February 2010.

Melissa Jackson, “The Humble Leech's Medical Magic,”
BBC
News online, July 2, 2004.

PAGE 26: BLOODLETTING IN TALMUDIC TIMES, AND THE REFERENCE TO MAIMONIDES

Fred Rosner, “Bloodletting in Talmudic Times,”
Journal of Urban Health: Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine
62, no. 9 (November 1986).

PAGES 26–27: FAMOUS PEOPLE WHO DIED DURING BLOODLETTING

Liakat Ali Parapia, “History of Bloodletting by Phlebotomy,”
British Journal of Haematology
143, no. 4 (November 2008).

PAGES 28–29: WILLIAM HARVEY AND BLOOD CIRCULATION

The quote about William Harvey shaking up the seventeenth-century medical establishment comes from page xii of Thomas Wright,
Circulation: William Harvey's Revolutionary Idea
(Vintage Books, 2012).

PAGES 29–34: BLOOD TRANSFUSIONS

Just a few hundred years ago, we were transfusing animal blood into humans. Details about the seventeenth-century adventures in blood transfusions in Paris were drawn from: Douglas Starr,
Blood:
An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce
(Quill, 2000) and Holly Tucker,
Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution
(W. W. Norton, 2011).

PAGES 32–33: NORMAN BETHUNE

Much has been written about the Canadian, who remains revered in China. For a summary of his contribution to blood transfusion advances in the Spanish Civil War, see: Peter H. Pinkerton, “Norman Bethune, Eccentric, Man of Principle, Man of Action, Surgeon, and His Contribution to Blood Transfusion in War,”
Transfusion Medicine Reviews
, July 2007.

PAGES 34–45: MENSTRUATION

The observation about women's “defective barrels” comes from page 47 of Janice Delaney's book
The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation
(University of Illinois Press, 1988).

Since Delaney writes critically about how men in ancient times speculated about women's menstrual cycles, I found it helpful to check out the original comments. A.L. Peck translated Aristotle's
Generation of Animals
for Harvard University Press in 1943.

Martha K. McClintock, “Social Control of the Ovarian Cycle and the Function of Estrous Synchrony,”
American Zoologist
21, no. 1 (1981).

Mark A. Guterman
,
Payal Mehta, and Margaret S. Gibbs, “Menstrual Taboos Among Major Religions,”
Internet Journal of World Health and Societal Politics
5, no.2 (2008).

Allyn Gaestel, “Women in Nepal Suffer Monthly Ostracization,”
New York Times
(online), June 14, 2013.

Tom Porteous, “‘I Need Feminism Because . . .': in Pictures,”
The Tab
, April 23, 2013,
http://cambridge.tab.co.uk/2013/04/23/i-need-feminism-because-in-pictures/
.

Richard Neill, Facebook post, October 8, 2012,
www.facebook.com/Bodyform/posts/10151186887359324.

“Bodyform Responds: The Truth,”
www.youtube.com
.

Arwa Mahdawi, “Bodyform's Bloodless Snark Attack,”
Guardian
(Manchester) online, October 17, 2012
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/17/bodyform-bloodless-snark-attack.

Stephanie Nolen, “India's Improbable Champion for Affordable Feminine Hygiene,”
Globe and Mail,
October 3, 2012.

Gloria Steinem, “If Men Could Menstruate,” in
Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions
(Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983).

PAGES 50–51: IGNAZ SEMMELWEIS

For the life and struggles of Ignaz Semmelweis and his efforts to prevent blood poisoning in maternity wards in the early and mid-nineteenth century in Austria, I first drew upon a book by my maternal grandfather: George Bender,
Great Moments in Medicine
(Parke-Davis, 1961).

To be sure that my grandfather wasn't telling a tall tale, I kept looking:

Patrick Berche and Jean-Jacques Lefrère, “Ignaz Semmelweis,”
La presse médicale
online, January 2011,
www.em-consulte.com/revue/lpm
.

S. W. B. Newsom, “Pioneers in Infection Control: Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis,”
Journal of Hospital Infection
23, no. 3 (March 1993)
.

PAGES 51–55: RH DISEASE (HEMOLYTIC DISEASE)

For details about early efforts to combat Rh disease (hemolytic disease), which remained the leading cause of neonatal and infant mortality until the middle of the twentieth century, I spoke with Raymonde Marius of Winnipeg, who donated plasma more than 1,000 times over the course of 40 years. I also spoke with Cheryl Lawson of Cangene Corporation in Winnipeg.

For details about the pioneering medical work of Dr. Bruce Chown of Winnipeg, who helped find a way to prevent the type A blood of a mother from attacking the type A+ blood of her fetus, see the article and video on the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame website:
www.cdnmedhall.org/d-bruce-chown
.

More details about Bruce Chown can be found in C. Peter W. Warren,
The Birth of a Medical Research Programme: The Rhesus (Rh) Factor Studies, Dr. Bruce Chown, and the Faculty of Medicine, University of Manitoba, 1883–1946,
an unpublished Ph.D. thesis for the Departments of History, Universities of Manitoba and Winnipeg, 2011.

Additional details came from the “Blood Components” article mentioned above in
Nursing Standard
, and from Kym H. Kilbourne's article “
RHO
(D) Immune Saves Thousands of Lives,”
The Source,
Winter 2010.

CHAPTER 2

PAGES 67–69: PAULA FINDLAY

If you are interested in what can go wrong with the human body on the day of one of its biggest tests — a triathlon in the Olympic games — see this blog post: Paula Findlay, “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” September 11, 2012,
http://paulafindlay.blogspot.ca
.

PAGES 76–80: HUMAN SACRIFICE

Entire books are devoted to human sacrifice, and I relied on some of them to write just a few pages on the subject. Among the most helpful were:

Mark Pizzato,
Theatres of Human Sacrifice: From Ancient Ritual to Screen Violence
(State University of New York Press, 2005). In his first chapter, Pizzatto describes the theatrical element of human sacrifice in ancient cultures.

In
Other Others: Levinas, Literature, Transcultural Studies
(
SUNY
Press, 2010), Steven Shankman offers an interesting meditation on how Caravaggio and Rembrandt offered contrasting paintings about the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac.

Miranda Aldhouse Green,
Dying for the Gods: Human Sacrifice in Iron Age and Roman Empire
(Tempus Publishing Group, 2001).

For an article that explains the story of the kamikaze pilots during World War II and challenges the notion that all such pilots were happy to give up their lives for Japan's war effort, see David Powers, “Japan: No Surrender in World War Two,”
BBC
History website, February 17, 2011,
www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/japan_no_surrender_01.shtml
.

PAGES 80–82: HONOUR KILLINGS

For information about honour killings, see two articles, the first about the killings as an international phenomenon and the second about how they have been unfolding in Canada:

Robert Fisk, “The Crime Wave That Shames the World,”
Independent
(London), September 7, 2010.

Marie-Pierre Robert, “Les crimes d'honneur ou le déshonneur du crime: étude des cas canadiens,”
Canadian Criminal Law Review
16 (2011).

PAGES 82–83: GREEK MYTHOLOGY

Marie
Carrière
, Médée protéiforme
(University of Ottawa Press, 2012).

See
Wikipedia
article on Uranus at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranus_(mythology)
.

See
Wikipedia
article on Aphrodite at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphrodite
.

PAGES 84–87: ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI AND JUDITH SLAYING HOLOFERNES

My daughter Eve Freedman introduced me to the paintings by the Italian Artemisia Gentileschi about the story of Judith slaying Holofernes (in the Book of Judith). In an effort to catch up with a sixteen-year-old art history buff, I began to read up on the story.

For a quick overview of Gentileschi's life: see
“Artemisia Gentileschi,”
Encyclopedia of World Biography
(
www.encyclopedia.com
).

If women wanted to paint in Gentileschi's seventeenth-century Italy, they had to be married to painters: David Platzer, “Feminist Icon? David Platzer Salutes an Exhibition That Demonstrates the Greatness of Gentileschi — in Both Her Painting and Her Life,”
Apollo,
June 2012.

For an art historian's book on Gentileschi, see Mary D. Garrard,
Artemisia Gentileschi
(Princeton University Press, 1991).

Mary D. Garrard and Gloria Steinem wrote a flyer to criticize a film for trivializing the rape of Gentileschi:
www.h-net.org/~women/threads/disc-inaccurate.html.

For a news article about the film: Jonathan Jones, “Screen: The historians called it rape. The filmmaker called it romance. No wonder the feminists are up in arms,”
Guardian
(Manchester), May 29, 1998.

For the suggestion that Artemisia may have painted
Judith Slaying Holofernes
in response to her rape by Tassi, see
Rachel Spence,
“Artemisia Gentileschi: Story of a Passion, Palazzo Reale, Milan,”
FT.com
November 23, 2011.

PAGES 88–89: TRUTH AND BEAUTY

Ann Patchett's memoir
Truth and Beauty
(HarperCollins, 2004) is a story of friendship between two women, one of whom survives a childhood bout with cancer of the jaw, but embarks on a tragic path.

PAGES 89–98: STEM CELLS

Eric M. Meslin, Director, Indiana University Center for Bioethics and Associate Dean for Bioethics, Indiana University School of Medicine, provided me with information about embryonic stem cells and their controversy. As the former Executive Director of the U.S. National Bioethics Advisory Commission, Meslin was responsible for the Commission's publication
Ethical Issues in Human Stem Cell Research
(September 1999).

For introductory material about stem cells, see the National Institutes of Health website at
http://stemcells.nih.gov
.

For details about stem cell research in Canada, see the article “Stem Cell Research” by Patricia Bailey in
The Canadian Encyclopedia
,
www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/articles/stem-cell-research
.

Advita Fund
USA
offers information about bone marrow transplants and their history on its website,
www.advitausa.org/bone-marrow-transplant-understanding-the-term-and-procedure
.

For information about the National Marrow Donor Program based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, see
Wikipedia
, “National Marrow Donor Program.”

For information about haematopoiesis, which is the formation of
 
blood cellular components, see
Wikipedia,
“Haematopoeisis.”

Eliane Gluckman, Head of the Department of Bone Marrow Transplantation at the Hôpital Saint-Louis in Paris, has written extensively on issues of bone marrow transplants, as well as about the uses of cord blood. Her article “A Brief History of Haematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation” appeared in
esh-ebmt
Handbook on Haematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation
, published by the European School of Haematology in 2012. Gluckman's article, which can be found online, notes that after the Americans dropped atomic bombs on Japan and ended World War II, scientists began to look for ways to protect people from radiation, which led to stem cell research and bone marrow transplants.