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I have grown up in a country with one of the best and safest blood supplies in the world. I have been spoiled. The scientific wizardry of Filton; the efficient blood donation and delivery system. That is not how much of the world gets its blood.
In law, India’s blood supply is rigorously monitored and a voluntary system. This fiction is as flimsy as paper.
Visiting British journalists are not going to fill the hole in India’s blood supply. They shouldn’t accept my blood anyway: like anyone else who was born in Britain or living there before 1996, I am a global pariah.
For most of human history, we have preferred to remove blood, not add it.
The leech is in many ways a simple animal, but its anesthetic and anticoagulant have yet to be bettered by science.
“The body had three doors through which it could evacuate nocive matter,” wrote Glasscheib. “Through the skin in the form of sweat, through the kidneys as urine and through the bowels as feces. But since there were four juices there must also be four exits. The doctors invented this fourth door in the shape of bloodletting.”
It’s easy to scorn this misplaced precision from our privileged position in the twenty-first century. My tonsils were removed as a child because it was standard procedure. I bled for hours into one side of the pillow and then, when the nurse turned it over phlegmatically, the other. Tonsillectomies are now considered old-fashioned and are rarely performed, only forty years later.
King George II finally put an end to the rivalry by setting up two separate guilds in 1745.26 After this, surgeons did surgery and barbers did what barbers do now, but both could pull teeth.
In the nineteenth century, a man named Thomas Erskine was convinced that being bled by two leeches had saved his life. Despite the abundant use of leeches, gratitude to them was rarely expressed. But Erskine—who served as Lord Chancellor in the most optimistic Ministry of All the Talents—named his leeches Home and Cline, after two eminent Victorian surgeons, and made them pets.
Despite some interesting measures to protect donors’ health—a Massachusetts law dictated that donors get a pint of whiskey as well as $25—doctors complained that the donor was often in greater need than the recipient.
Blood altruism was praised in the press, but the sellers were dominant: even in the 1930s they were powerful enough to form a union.
To counter the helplessness of mass disaster, we donate a pint of usefulness: this instinct persists today. After 9/11, 570,000 additional units of blood were donated, but 208,000 were discarded and only 260 units were needed to treat 9/11 victims.
Russians allowed for a more real intimacy. And why not, when people were sharing something as intimate as body fluid? Each bottle of donated Russian blood was labeled with the donor’s name and contact details. As most Russian donors were women, and the blood went to serving soldiers, this had a predictable outcome. In 1943, the Dundee Courier reported that this friendly transfusion “has led to a number of romances between the soldier patient and the blood giver.” In some cases, soldiers wounded for the second time asked for blood from the same girl.
(When depot staff couldn’t find a vein, they called it “Digging for Victory.”)
For Major General W. H. Ogilvie, “the greatest surgical advance of this war, more important even than penicillin, is the development of the transfusion service.
Your schoolmates, unlike Goodyear’s at his previous school, were unlikely to beat you up just to see what that did to a hemophiliac. (When Goodyear’s previous headmaster introduced him by saying, “You must not hit this boy,” his fate was fixed.)
In 1983, the vice president of Armour, a large US fractionator, testified to government that people who supplied the plasma for concentrate had it collected forty to sixty times a year. At that rate, “and given the pool sizes in the United States, four infected persons could contaminate the entire world supply of Factor VIII concentrate.”
In 1975, reporters for World in Action, a British investigative current affairs TV program, traveled to various US cities to meet people who were selling their plasma. A man named Gary in San Francisco was asked whether he always answers questions about his health truthfully. “No.” He reconsidered. “You know, yeah, most of the time.” He is scornful of the health screening. “I’m healthy, you know?” Another donor says simply, “Pardon me while I puke.”
By 1980 in the US, payment for blood had come to be seen as unethical. But 70 percent of the country’s plasma came from paid sellers and no one saw anything wrong with it.
This is not a simple story of patriarchal men imposing evil restrictions on suffering women. Chaupadi is driven by women. It is perpetuated by the grandmothers and the mothers-in-law and the mothers.
In the early 1960s, NASA was wondering whether women would make good astronauts, being smaller and lighter, both qualities ideal for cramped space vehicles. A 1964 report, though, found two problems: wombs and hormones. It would be unfeasible to match “a temperamental psychophysiologic human and the complicated machine.”
When Sally Ride, the first female astronaut, was preparing for a seven-day space mission, she was asked how many tampons she would need. By scientists. Was one hundred the right number? She said no, that was not the right number.
Today, NASA employs Dr. Varsha Jain, a woman with the best business card in science, as it reads SPACE GYNECOLOGIST
A tampon, as the eminent disgustologist Paul Rozin found, sets off all the disgust alarms: when his research team asked men and women to put the tip of an unused tampon—unwrapped in front of them—into their mouths, 69 percent refused. Three percent wouldn’t even touch it.
