The New Yorker Magazine reviews a new book called “Nine Pints” – This Post Dedicated to RBG
[It’s a long article and has tidbits about historical/cultural views on menstruation, the Eucharist, ingesting blood, and blood libel. Gives hints about likely origins of superstitions held by cultists]
Ancient peoples …were certain of blood’s importance and fascinated by its mystery. For them, blood was something hidden—visible only when flowing from a wound, or during childbirth, miscarriage, and menstruation—so it became a symbol both of life and of death.
Observant Jews and Muslims alike follow dietary laws that forbid the consumption of blood. Both kosher meat and halal meat must be drained of blood, and kosher meat is also salted, to remove any residue of the substance.
In pre-modern times, blood was not only a target of treatment but also a source of medicine. Richard Sugg, in his remarkable book “Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires” (2011), traces the belief in blood’s healing powers back to ancient Rome. Drawing on a report by Pliny the Elder, he conjures a scene at the Colosseum:
“The man sprawled at such an odd angle beside the injured fighter has his face pressed against a gaping tear in the gladiator’s throat. He is drinking blood fresh from the wound. Why? . . . He suffers from epilepsy, and is using a widely known cure for his mysterious affliction.”
Gladiatorial combat declined in the fourth century, with the reign of Constantine, the first Christian emperor, but the consumption of human blood continued, with supplies coming instead from criminals at executions. The ailing would swallow it “fresh and hot, seconds after a beheading.” Sugg writes, citing medieval accounts from Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. In 1483, King Louis XI of France, a paranoid religious fanatic, reportedly imbibed meals of blood collected from healthy children—a vain attempt to stave off his imminent death from leprosy. When Pope Innocent VIII was dying, in 1492, he was allegedly given the blood of three boys by a Jewish physician, in the hopes of channelling some of their youthful energy.
Some of the more eye-catching and controversial experiments in recent blood research are, in a way, resurrecting the alchemists’ age-old hope—that blood might prove an elixir of youth. One such field is parabiosis—the name comes from the Greek for “next to” and “life.” By attaching two animals together, like conjoined twins, scientists have been able to observe the effects of sharing blood.
Since 2013, Amy Wagers, a stem-cell researcher at Harvard, has studied parabiosis in pairs of differently aged mice. Wagers and her team have reported that when blood from a young mouse circulates through an older mouse it can reverse the deterioration of its muscles and rejuvenate its brain.
Blood was also held to be an aphrodisiac, and alchemists prepared extracts of it, promising patients that it “maketh old age lusty, and to continue in like estate a long time.”
Several companies now advertise age reversal through infusions of young blood. George’s book features one, Ambrosia, named after the food of the gods, which has clinics in San Francisco and Tampa. Its founder, Jesse Karmazin, was a doctor at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital until 2016, but he has since signed a voluntary agreement to cease practicing in Massachusetts—a tactic, as George notes, typically used by doctors who are threatened with the loss of their medical license.
Karmazin boasts extraordinary results: patients reported feeling younger, and at least one was allegedly cured of Alzheimer’s. Cancer, heart disease, and diabetes, Karmazin says, can all be treated with two litres of young plasma.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/14/the-history-of-blood