Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [35]
The Hebrews certainly weren’t alone in their belief that blood was a special juice, nor were they the only ones who spent considerable time and effort spilling it for those beliefs. So important was this fluid that the offering up of blood was thought by many cultures to be the ultimate way to atone for one’s sins, to pay homage to one’s god or gods or to cure one’s self of various ills. (Countess Báthory serves as a rather extreme example of the latter.) Generally, animals were sacrificed. Calves were popular, possibly because they were easy to lead around and their blood could cover a lot of altar surface, but in far too many cases to fathom human blood was considered to be the ultimate sacrifice—whether it was shed for atonement, revenge, the gods, or a cure.
Scientific knowledge of blood and the circulatory system was, to put it mildly, rather slow to come about. To put it less mildly, most of the early information was dead wrong, yet somehow it lingered in the field of medicine for over two thousand years. Here’s how it happened.
Around 400 BCE, Hippocrates proposed (among many other things) that the human body contained four substances called humors: black bile, yellow bile (or choler), phlegm, and blood. When the four humors were balanced, the person remained healthy, but any humoral imbalance led to sickness, misery, and despair. Accordingly, to the ancient Greeks, it was the volume of blood that dictated the health of an individual.*48 It should come as no surprise, then, that starvation, vomiting, and bleeding were used to treat perceived excesses in humors, while other patients were instructed to gorge themselves when their humoral levels needed boosting.
As adopted by Claudius Galenus (better known in English as Galen) nearly six hundred years after Hippocrates, humoral imbalances were not only used to explain how people got sick but how they got their personalities. Too much phlegm, for example, led to a lack of emotion in the individual—a phlegmatic personality. On the other hand, too much blood led to a “sanguine” or carefree temperament. In this case, nosebleeds, hemorrhoids, and menstruation were looked upon as the body’s way of restoring normal blood levels.
Earlier, while working as a physician at a gladiator school in the Turkish city of Pergamon, Galen, the son of a wealthy architect, had glimpses of internal human anatomy, referring to wounds as “windows into the body.” The thirty-two-year-old Galen moved to Rome in 160 CE, but the Roman ban on human dissection meant that he would never get to explore what was on the other side of that window. Galen was reduced to making inferences about the human condition by examining animals like macaques (a type of Old World monkey), pigs, and goats. These animals were often dissected alive and in public, and Galen’s “hands-on-guts” public demonstrations made him incredibly popular. Unfortunately, although Galen’s dissections set him apart from more traditional physicians (who employed a distinctly less hands-on approach), his reliance on inference, conjecture, and his own imagination often led to conclusions about the human body that were dead wrong.
Galen eventually became the personal physician of Emperor Marcus Aurelius and later his son Commodus.*49 Although Galen was much more interested in the central nervous system than he was in the circulatory system, he did prove, among other things, that blood, not pneuma (an airlike spiritual essence dreamed up by the ancient Greeks), traveled through arteries.
On the other hand, Galen had no real concept of blood circulation. He believed that blood ebbed and flowed like the tides, with venous blood originating from and returning to the liver.†50 Unwilling