Five Quarts_ A Personal and Natural History of Blood - Bill Hayes [4]
Steve knows the exact sensation, though he has a harder time nowadays physically attaining it. A man who’s nothing if not fearless with his metaphors, Steve told me a couple of years back that one of the clearest descriptions of this feeling, this quasi-spiritual energy surge, could be found in a comic book. I was dubious, but as he told me about a character called the Flash, I began to see how perfectly it did fit. You see, he explained, this superhero is able to run superfast because he taps into a field of energy called the Speed Force.
I wanted to know what it looks like in the comic, how the Flash finds it, that sort of thing.
“It just exists,” Steve said, matter-of-fact. “He’s able to ‘feel’ it.” He smiled and shrugged, adding, “He can also share his speed with other people, share his power.”
The strength Steve and I have drawn from each other over the past decade has certainly gotten us through some rough times as he has battled AIDS. Of course, love and support are just a part of our arsenal. His survival has depended, to a great extent, on superb doctors. And the “miracles” we’ve experienced in our life—the powerful new drugs approved just in time, the wholly unexpected positive blood work, Steve’s Lazarus-like return from dire illness—seem more a product of the pharmaceutical industry than the intervention of a divine being. While things are currently not great, they’re not terrible, either. We’re in a holding pattern of hope, anxious but not desperate. We have placed our faith in science.
But faith does not preclude questioning. I’ve never missed joining Steve at a doctor’s appointment, and we always arrive with a list of questions to raise, whether about symptoms, drug side effects, or medications in the pipeline. The three of us go through Steve’s blood work test by test to assess how his regimen is working. When his doctor recommends a new drug, we then do our own research in treatment journals and online before filling the prescription. The scrutiny to which new medications are subjected today is easy to take for granted. It’s mind blowing, by contrast, to look into the history of a long-lived remedy for which the most extravagant claims were made when no conclusive proof of its value ever existed: bloodletting. The practice of withdrawing blood to treat a spectrum of ailments, everything from insomnia to hemorrhage, only died out in the United States in the 1920s. It had endured throughout much of the world for more than twenty-five centuries—twenty-five centuries!—making it, in my view, the longest-running clinical trial in medicine, one that involved millions of patients and persisted on nothing but anecdotal evidence.
The earliest and most influential surviving texts on bloodletting were written by a Greek doctor named Galen (A.D. 129–200), who began his career tending to wounded gladiators and rose to become the Western world’s supreme authority on medicine. Galen’s views were considered medical gospel for fourteen hundred years, and I can understand why. He makes an illogical practice sound downright reasonable. His writing voice is so clear and commanding, it is almost a summons.
Galen first made a name for himself at the Coliseum in Pergamum, a small kingdom in what’s now western Turkey. There, as the chief physician to the gladiators, Galen was the ancient equivalent of an ER doctor, treating the freshly butchered in his trauma ward in the basement of the stadium. Just as a modern physician might hear the distant wail of an ambulance and know a body was on its way, Galen may have had his own alarm system in the collective gasps and muffled yelps of the crowds overhead. This gifted twenty-eight-year-old,