Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood

by Rose George

most of my cells are replaced every seven years,31 but I’m on my 143rd round of red blood cells, which live for about 115 days.32 There is a popular philosophical question about identity and self,

Theseus’s paradox: If all the planks were replaced in his vessel, was it still his ship? If I have replaced many of the cells I was born with, and none of the red blood I had at Christmas, am I still me?

But nothing from nurses about what having someone for leeching meant, nor how they felt about it when they set off for the patient’s room clutching a tub of annelids. She panicked and went to OBoyle. “I’ve got no foundation!” But he said, “Your foundation is that there’s nothing out there.”

“They might visibly squirm and distort their faces as they described the leeches and their need to be close to and manipulate them.” They described them as “the black slug,” “bloodsucking, slimy bugs,” and “creepy crawlies.” Other things they didn’t like: that the leech, that “dirty walking needle,” went against all their training: hygiene control was paramount, yet a live creature full of potentially toxic blood was moving around their hygienic hospital ward.

Human and animal blood is the thirteenth most traded commodity in the world, worth $252 billion. Most of that is products derived from plasma, and most of it is coming from the United States, the largest exporter of plasma. In 2016, the category of “human and animal blood”—actually mostly blood fractions such as plasma products—earned the United States $19 billion, close to what it got from selling medium-size cars or soybeans.4 The chief of America’s Blood Centers, an association of blood banks, has called it the OPEC of plasma.5 Half of Europe’s plasma for medicinal products comes from American veins.6