Five Quarts A Personal and Natural History of Blood

Gorgon's Blood The first drop stains the pale, clammy flesh. It's as if the skinned potato, not my sliced finger, is bleeding. Were the cut anywhere else on my body I'd have it under the faucet by now or washed with soap, yet I persist in sucking it. The blood is warm, warmer than saliva. This is what 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit feels like on the tongue. There's always a momentless than a moment, actually; however long it takes an instinct to fire, as hand flies to mouthwhen I think the blood will taste good (an expectation I'd never have, it strikes me, for other bodily fluids): as earthy as cooked beets or sweet as cassis. Wrong again. Okay, so it doesn't taste good, but it doesn't taste bad, either. If it did, all creatures would be repulsed from licking clean their wounds. Blood's no worse than a lick of sweat yet also not something to be savored. That it tastes faintly like metal, as some people say, is not an undeserved analogy; blood is iron-rich. Two-thirds of the body's store of iron can be found there. Others say with great specificity that it tastes like a mouthful of change (have they tasted mouthfuls of change?), suggesting, too, that blood is currency, which it certainly is, a donated pint at a blood bank being valued at more than a hundred dollars, according to the FDA. Yet both of these analogies are imprecise, for pennies have a different flavor than quarters, don't they? And there's a world of difference between the lip of an aluminum beer can and a sterling silver teaspoon. I'm reminded of my high school friend Melaine, now a mother of three, who has worked for twenty years as a technician in a hospital surgical unit and has, to her profound regret, acquired a fine nose for blood. Like body odor, she tells me, everyone's smells different; some blood is pungent and sickening, some almost fruity. She sees blood as a constantly brewing stew, a mix of red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets, all floating in plasma, the watery medium that carries nutrients to, and waste from, the body's one hundred trillion cells. This basic recipe is then often spiced with medications, alcohol, nicotine, or other ingredients. Melaine thinks that each person's blood is an olfactory signature, which leads me to think that no two samples would taste alike, either. According to historians, Roman gladiators drank the blood of vanquished foes to acquire their strength and courage (a practice reputedly also followed by the nineteenth-century Indonesian headhunters, the Tolalaki, among other cannibals). But, if true, how exactly did the gladiators drink this blood: in bejeweled loving cups or straight from the jugular? Lapping it off a felled man's chest, perhaps? In any event, why didn't these victorious gladiators drink their own blood instead? They were the winners, after all. Nitpicking about how it was drunk, whose blood was braver, and so forth, however, is missing a larger point. What makes the gladiator behavior truly arresting is this: They didn't fear contact with blood. On the contrary, they gloried in it. Even the spectators were allowed, on occasion, to rush the arena to join blood-drinking free-for-alls. Sated, a gladiator or spectator may have even taken some to later sell. Gladiator's blood, both a cure for certain diseases and a good-luck talisman for new brides, was a valuable commodity. Even so, in those days, the most prized blood of all was not that of a man but of a mythical creature, as found in the tale of Asclepius, god of medicine. Asclepius, the illegitimate child of a beautiful maiden and the god of light, Apollo, has one of the juiciest backstories in classical mythology. He'd not even been born yet when his mother was slain by his fatHayes, Bill is the author of 'Five Quarts A Personal and Natural History of Blood', published 2006 under ISBN 9780345456885 and ISBN 0345456882.