More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Rose George
Read between
March 22 - May 6, 2020
the three main diagnostic tools of a doctor: the others are imaging and a physical examination.
invaders. It is a tissue and an organ at once. ‘The heart,’ a haematologist tells me, ‘is a pump for circulating our most important organ.’
There is a popular philosophical question about identity and self, named Theseus’s ship or Theseus’s paradox: if all the planks were replaced in his vessel, was it still his ship?
both. A nation-state needs 1 to 3 per cent of its population to give blood to maintain an adequate blood supply,36 the higher the better.
Blood storage was already being done by then, but it was Fantus who thought up debt and repayment of blood, who saw blood as a product to be transacted, not a gift.
(My last two have gone to hospitals in Derby and Sheffield: you’re welcome, cancer patients, new mothers, trauma victims, and anaemic people of Derby and Sheffield.)
The leeches that I have driven several hundred miles to encounter are freshwater, bloodsucking, multi-segmented annelid worms with ten stomachs, thirty-two brains, nine pairs of testicles, and several hundred teeth that leave a distinct bite mark.
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 strips were the bandages, the red strips the blood. The ball on the top was probably a deformation of the blood-gathering bowl.
After this, surgeons did surgery and barbers did what barbers do now, but both could pull teeth.
A surgeon in Napoleon’s army, François-Joseph-Victor Broussais, became ‘the most sanguinary physician in history.’
For disgust theorists – there are such people, and they are great – it’s because things and creatures that disgust are things and creatures that are dangerous. A discarded hair that can transmit disease is more disgusting than one attached to a head. A caterpillar, which is unlikely to infest you, is less repellent than a worm, which might.
The disgustologist Dr Val Curtis has found that Indians were disgusted by urine, sweat, menstrual blood, cut hair, childbirth, vomit, mice and rats, lower castes, and decaying waste.63 The Dutch, meanwhile, were repelled
nervelessness of this woman. Some of it comes from privilege. But much of it is her own,
Human and animal blood is the thirteenth most traded commodity in the world, worth £187,000 million.
His mother, with her cut-glass accent and pussy-bow blouse, also seems serene yet tightly wound. Her
how could women bleed and not die, when men bled and did?
The blood turned bad when man became a farmer, life became more stable, and he had less need of magical protection.
‘Perhaps it is due to your predominantly individualistic psychology, which isolates people from each other so completely that the thought of fusing them is almost incomprehensible to your scientists.’ We poor selfish humans, confined to our seventy or so years of life because we refuse these ‘regular comradely exchanges of life’.14
