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

by Rose George

The bleeding barber is the reason modern barbers display red and white striped poles: the pole was a stick for the patient to grip; the white stripes were the bandages, the red stripes the blood. The ball on the top was probably a deformation of the blood-gathering bowl.

In many interviews, she said the same: “Someone once said, ‘Janet was the only person who had the sense to set up an Emergency Service in a bar.’”

The war embedded the idea of blood donation in popular consciousness like nothing else had done. There was nothing more powerful than the message that blood was going, almost directly, into the veins of a wounded soldier, even if it wasn’t.

Human and animal blood is the thirteenth most traded commodity in the world, worth $252 billion.

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.

“The practice of medicine is a political act however you choose to do it.”

“When you introduce a profit margin, you’ve now introduced a competing value to safety.”

Fetal genes want to ensure their own survival so suck up as many resources as possible.

The blood turned bad when man became a farmer, life became more stable, and he had less need of magical protection. Then, the menstruating woman became taboo, set apart and separated from things she may damage, like crops and harvests.

If dirt is matter out of place, then maintaining purity is a matter of putting people in their place. Imaginary dirt is such an effective weapon of limitation.

Mary Douglas once wrote that to understand purity rules, you have to ask whom they exclude. “The only thing that is universalistic about purity is the temptation to use it as a weapon.”23

Over 70 percent of the 747 women and girls surveyed during the Yatra’s travels had known nothing about periods before they began them because their mothers and grandmothers had told them nothing.

If girls can be persuaded to return to school because they have a toilet and good menstrual hygiene, then scholars of all ilks should be flocking to demonstrate this.

When researchers reviewed evidence from the American Medical Association’s Task Force on Gender Disparities in Clinical Decision Making, “physicians were found to consistently view women’s (but not men’s) symptom reports as caused by emotional factors, even in the presence of positive clinical tests.”

There is a connection: humor erodes taboos.

“I wanted to show the world, when you do a good thing you don’t need a fourteen-floor building with a five-degree slant and a lot of glass panels. You can do good under a tree.”