More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Rose George
Read between
November 2 - November 16, 2025
Michele and Julie are famous not because of their awful deaths but because they both became associated with a belief that endures: that bears and other wild creatures are attracted to menstrual odor, and that having a period in backcountry may be fatal.
The presence of rubbish and food waste from humans attracted the bears, not an externally worn sanitary pad.
I did a short and definitely unscientific test by using two search terms on PubMed, a database containing 27 million citations from journals and books. “Premenstrual” had 5,496 citations. “Erectile dysfunction” had 21,672. Erectile dysfunction must be distressing. But does it debilitate 90 percent of men for at least two days a month? Does it damage their ability to work, think, live? Premenstrual syndrome is so poorly understood, its existence continues to be questioned, though not by me.
When the psychologist Kathleen Lustyk made applications for grants to study PMS, they were refused “on the grounds that PMS does not actually exist.”
Educated girls are like yeast in the dough of sustainable, successful development (even dough kneaded by a menstruating woman). 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. The London School study found only sixty-five articles to review, a paltry number. It concluded that “menstruation is poorly understood and poorly researched” and that “there is a strong possibility that the best knowledge lies in the hands of those implementing programs.”
Children in postoperative pain: the boys were given codeine, while girls got paracetamol. One study found that male patients who had had a coronary artery bypass graft were given narcotics more often than female patients. The women were more often given sedative agents, “suggesting that female patients were more often perceived as anxious rather than in pain.”
It taught him, he says, that “the strongest creature created by god is not the elephant, not the tiger, not the lion, but the woman.”
This is his business model: he calls it the butterfly. Not like a mosquito, a parasite, which is how he thinks large corporations work. They suck what they need and they leave. The butterfly takes from the flower but leaves it undamaged. He is emphatic, though: his is not a charity. People must find a means to pay for his machine. It doesn’t have to be money: he believes in the barter system and has accepted payment in goats, buffalo, cattle. The same goes for when the machine is operational: women can buy pads with tomatoes or potatoes. Once, Unilever flew Muruga to London to get his wisdom.
...more
He wants a revolution. He says, “Man is dominating the world, and we are turning the world into olive green. I beg men, please give the world to women for at least half a century, they will make better what we did.”
Since the beginning of humans, women have coped with their periods in the same way: on their own, discreetly. They have been so good at this, historians must guess at what they used and how often and how they disposed of it. Women’s menstrual technology rarely made it into written history, as it was mostly written by men.
But plain speaking and feminine hygiene have never been comfortable companions. The advertising of sanitary products on TV and radio in the United States was banned until 1972.
Until 1992, the US National Institutes of Health had no programs for vaginal research.30 This is an extraordinary fact, because the vagina is an extraordinary thing.
because tampons and pads are classified as medical devices, there are no regulations requiring manufacturers to disclose ingredients.48 Nor is the FDA currently required to do anything, should toxic shock or a similar health crisis happen again, other than recommend a recall of products.
State senator Athena Salman recently proposed a bill that would allow prisoners unlimited menstrual hygiene products and not allow prisons to charge for extra.
In 2017, New York State voted to provide adequate sanitary provisions to prisons, homeless shelters, and schools for free. It also revoked the tampon sales tax, as did eight other states.86 Ireland, Spain, and the Netherlands have removed the tampon tax; France has reduced it to 5.5 percent.87 In Switzerland, women filled thirteen Zurich fountains with red dye to protest the taxing of feminine hygiene at 8 percent (the rate reserved for luxury items; day-to-day products get 2.5 percent).88 In the UK the Conservative government pledged to remove the tax, did nothing, then used £250,000 (about
...more
Their curiosity is the educational kind, not vulgar. She is dying: they want to see how she can be saved.
City dwellers do not think like trauma medics, who designate cases as Car Versus Pedestrian or Pedestrian Versus Truck. This versus, so adversarial, is the truth of city life but one that we cannot afford to accept if we are to continue to function.
This is not my term: medics talk of the insult done to a body. Don’t mistake “talk-and-die” for callousness. It is an alert, a warning to medics not to be fooled, for them to plan for what is coming.
Bleeding, says Karim Brohi, a trauma and vascular surgeon at the Royal London, “is the biggest disease you have never heard of.” Nearly six million people a year die of injuries.3 Trauma accounts for 10 percent of the world’s deaths,
The usefulness of blood in transfusion was still being debated in the Second World War. The British used it; the Americans preferred plasma.
In Normandy he found “American surgical units borrowing 200–300 pints of blood daily from British Transfusion Units,
After American medics resorted to doing stealth transfusions in stealth transfusion stations, policy changed and American soldiers were given blood from their own compatriots, not borrowed from the Brits.
In the UK, all white blood cells must be removed from blood products because they can transmit vCJD.
Death from bleeding is preventable. In theory. That is the awful truth of hemorrhage, and a source of extreme frustration.
Knowledge of what happens in the body immediately after trauma—the “bad physiology”—is still opaque. This is not for want of trying. I lose count of the number of journals devoted to care that is critical, emergency, resuscitative, trauma. But it is difficult to carry out good, robust research on a just-injured body: How can you ask for patient consent to do randomized control studies on a person who has just hit a wall at eighty miles per hour? Trauma doctors in Maryland want to study whether inducing hypothermia in trauma patients, and lowering metabolism, can give doctors more time. A
...more
“Trauma,” Brohi wrote in a journal on traumatic injury, “is one of the greatest killers of humanity.”
Yet, “despite its high global impact, trauma remains low on governmental priorities, a side concern for funders and of only passing interest to most scientists.” In the UK, where forty-six people are killed each day by injury, trauma science still gets only 1 percent of medical research funding.
But for most of vampire history, he would not in fact have been interested in drinking your blood.
For these old Europeans, death could be sudden but it wasn’t immediate. Some people thought it took forty days for a dead person to properly die. For all that time, they were dead, but not quite.
Death, colonialism, the fear of turbulent change: vampires could be useful to account for a lot of anxieties. They were the most powerful, because what they stole was the most powerful substance and the most mysterious.
I know this sounds churlish. My dismay is directed at the vanity, at the rumors of the insultingly rich, people such as PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel, perhaps paying to have themselves injected with young blood or plasma.
Synthetic blood is possible in film and fiction and, as yet, nowhere else.
