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Blood

Blood

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:48 pm by Peter Leithart

Blood 2017-09-06T22:48:25+06:00 Peter Leithart

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Below is a transcript of a lecture delivered at Disputatio for NSA on Friday, September 17.

INTRODUCTION
In February of 1666, the English physician Richard Lower performed what he called a ?spectacular experiment?E Using a crude syringe made from a quill and a bladder designed by Christopher Wren, he ?selected a medium-sized [dog] and drew off its blood from an exposed jugular vein.?E His object was to drain as much blood as he could without killing the animal. As he explained, ?The dog first set up a wailing but soon its strength was exhausted and convulsive twitchings began.?E Then he rigged up another dog to one end of a reed, and began to drain the blood from the second dog into the first. While second dog slowly bled to death, the first dog recovered and was soon back to normal. Lower wrote, ?Oblivious of its hurts, [it] fawned upon its master, and rolled on the grass to clean itself of blood; exactly as it would have done it if had merely been thrown into a stream, and with no more sign of discomfort or pleasure?E(taken from Douglas Starr, Blood , p. 9).

Lower had been experimenting with transfusing blood from one dog to another for over a year and his work was soon taken up by other scientists. Samuel Pepys records that Edmund King performed Lower?s experiment at the Royal Society: ?Here Dr. Croone told me, that, at the meeting at Gresham College to-night, which, it seems, they now have every Wednesday again, there was a pretty experiment of the blood of one dogg let out, till he died, into the body of another on one side, while all his own run out on the other side. The first died upon the place, and the other very well, and likely to do well. This did give occasion to many pretty wishes, as of the blood of a Quaker to be let into an Archbishop, and such like; but, as Dr. Croone says, may, if it takes, be of mighty use to man’s health, for the amending of bad blood by borrowing from a better body.?E

Credit for the first blood transfusion to a human, however, goes to a Frenchman, Jean-Baptiste Denis, who transfused several blood several times into a Parisian madman named Antoine Mauroy in the winter of 1667. According to Douglas Starr?s account, ?At precisely six in the evening on December 19, according to the doctor?s report, an associate opened a vein in Mauroy?s arm, inserted a silver tube, and drained off about ten ounces of blood. He then inserted the other end of the tube into the leg artery of a calf and allowed about a cupful of the calf?s blood to flow into the man. The doctor hoped that the calf?s blood ?by its mildness and freshness might possibly allay the heat and ebullition of the patient?s blood.?? After the procedure, Mauroy slept for several hours, then awoke to eat and spent the evening singing. A second transfusion was less successful: ?we observed a plentiful sweat all over his face . . . He complained of great pains in his Kidneys, and that he was not well in his stomack, and that he was ready to choak unless they gave him his liberty . . . Whilst we were closing the wound, [Mauroy] vomited the store of Bacon and Fat he had eaten half an hour before.?E He urinated a large amount of black fluid, ?as if it had been mixed with the soot of Chimneys,?Ethe doctor recorded. Yet, ?he showed a surprising calmness, and a great presence of mind . . . and a general lassitude in all his limbs.?E Unknowingly, the calf?s blood contained proteins that might have been fatal to the patient.

Some time later, Mauroy?s wife returned to Denis, her husband having in the meantime fallen back into his madness. She demanded another transfusion, but Denis could see that the man was in no condition for the operation and refused. When Mauroy died a short time later, his wife began spreading slanderous rumors about Denis?Epractice, and he took her to court. The court cleared Denis of wrong-doing, but the case dealt a blow to the experiments with blood transfusions. Starr writes, the judge ?noted that transfusion was worrying the physicians of Paris. In deference to their concerns, he ruled that any doctor who wished to perform a transfusion must first seek permission from the Faculty of Medicine. That one small condition ?Evirtually an afterthought to the judgment ?Ewas a devastating blow. With the faculty representing the most hidebound, hierarchical doctors in France, the more progressive physicians from Monpelier, Rheims, and other universities would sooner abandon the procedure than submit to faculty approval. And so, despite Denis?Ecomplete exoneration, the practice of transfusion faded away. Two years later, the French Parliament officially banned all transfusions involving human beings?E(p. 15).

Lower, meanwhile, was incensed at Denis for moving in on his turf. When Denis published an account of his experiment in the July 22, 1667 issue of Philosophical Transactions, Lower wrote to protest: ?As word of this newly devised blood transfusion was fluttering everywhere on man?s lips, Dr. Dionys ?Eattempted to deprive me of the credit of originating this famous experiment and appropriated it to himself?E(p. 12). Lower worked to arrange other experiments, this time involving human beings. He found a willing patient, Arthur Coga, an indigent Cambridge graduate who is believed to have earned a bachelor of divinity, but who was known as a ?very freakish and extravagant man.” Edmund King, Lower?s associate in the experiments, said that “Mr. Coga was about thirty-two years of age; that he spoke Latin well, when he was in company, which he liked, but that his brain was sometimes a little too warm.”

Pepys also commented on this incident: ?Dr. Wilkins saying that he hath read for him in his church, that is poor and a debauched man, that the College’ have hired for 20s. to have some of the blood of a sheep let into his body; and it is to be done on Saturday next. They purpose to let in about twelve ounces; which, they compute, is what will be let in in a minute’s time by a watch. They differ in the opinion they have of the effects of it; some think it may have a good effect upon him as a frantic man by cooling his blood, others that it will not have any effect at all. But the man is a healthy man, and by this means will be able to give an account what alteration, if any, he do find in himself, and so may be usefull. On this occasion, Dr. Whistler told a pretty story related by Muffet, a good author, of Dr. Caius, that built Keys College; that, being very old, and living only at that time upon woman’s milk, he, while he fed upon the milk of an angry, fretful woman, was so himself; and then, being advised to take it of a good-natured, patient woman, he did become so, beyond the common temper of his age. Thus much nutriment, they observed, might do.?E On November 30, Pepys wrote, ?I was pleased to see the person who had his blood taken out. He speaks well, and did this day give the Society a relation thereof in Latin, saying that he finds himself much better since, and as a new man, but he is cracked a little in his head, though he speaks very reasonably, and very well. He had but 20s. for his suffering it, and is to have the same again tried upon him: the first sound man that ever had it tried on him in England, and but one that we hear of in France, which was a porter hired by the virtuosos. Here all the afternoon till within night.?EAsked why he had wanted sheep?s blood, Coga replied: ?Ei> Sanguis ovis symbolicam quandam facultatem habet cum sanguine Christi, quia Christus est agnus Dei .?E

England soon followed the French example of banning all transfusions involving humans, and after two men died in Rome following transfusions ?the pope banned the practice throughout most of Europe. One and a half centuries would pass before doctors attempted another experimental human transfusion, and then only using the blood of other human beings?E(Starr, 15). It was not an auspicious start for a practice that is now a global business.

BLOOD IN HUMAN
CULTURE
Even before blood transfusions became normal, manipulation of blood had an important role in medical practice. For millennia, however, it had been more common to remove blood than to introduce it. There is evidence that the Egyptians practiced blood-letting as early as 2500 B.C., and in some places in the U.S. it was still practiced into the 1920s. Bleeding was very popular in the middle ages. Douglas Starr records that ?At an archeological dig of an ancient monastery in Scotland, scientists recently found a whole stratum of blood waste, accounting for an estimated three hundred thousand pints of blood?E(p. 19).

Blood has also been central to cultural, social, and religious practice, and this going to be more the focus of this lecture. I will discuss two areas, which are related in various ways: blood ?taboos?Eor impurities and blood kinship. Along the way I will point to some anthropological theories that have attempted to explain these practices.

First, blood taboos or prohibitions. These are of various sorts, but can perhaps be summarized under three main heads: Blood is defiling, unclean, and dangerous when it is spilled, eaten, or leaked. In his classic of comparative religion, The Golden Bough , Sir James Frazer summarized a number of the prohibitions concerning spilling blood: ?the Flamen Dialis was forbidden to touch or even name raw flesh. At certain times a Brahman teacher is enjoined not to look on raw flesh, blood, or persons whose hands have been cut off. In Uganda the father of twins is in a state of taboo for some time after birth; among other rules he is forbidden to kill anything or to see blood. In the Pelew Islands when a raid has been made on a village and a head carried off, the relations of the slain man are tabooed and have to submit to certain observances in order to escape the wrath of his ghost. They are shut up in the house, touch no raw flesh, and chew betel over which an incantation has been uttered by the exorcist. After this the ghost of the slaughtered man goes away to the enemy?s country in pursuit of his murderer. The taboo is probably based on the common belief that the soul or spirit of the animal is in the blood. As tabooed persons are believed to be in a perilous state ?Efor example, the relations of the slain man are liable to the attacks of his indignant ghost ?Eit is especially necessary to isolate them from contact with spirits; hence the prohibition to touch raw meat. But as usual the taboo is only the special enforcement of a general precept; in other words, its observance is particularly enjoined in circumstances which seem urgently to call for its application, but apart from such circumstances the prohibition is also observed, though less strictly, as a common rule of life. Thus some of the Esthonians will not taste blood because they believe that it contains the animal?s soul, which would enter the body of the person who tasted the blood. Some Indian tribes of North America, ?through a strong principle of religion, abstain in the strictest manner from eating the blood of any animal, as it contains the life and spirit of the beast.?EJewish hunters poured out the blood of the game they had killed and covered it up with dust. They would not taste the blood, believing that the soul or life of the animal was in the blood, or actually was the blood.?E

Spilled blood, especially the blood of a king, can be dangerous. Frazer again: ?It is a common rule that royal blood may not be shed upon the ground. Hence when a king or one of his family is to be put to death a mode of execution is devised by which the royal blood shall not be spilt upon the earth. About the year 1688 the generalissimo of the army rebelled against the king of Siam and put him to death ?after the manner of royal criminals, or as princes of the blood are treated when convicted of capital crimes, which is by putting them into a large iron caldron, and pounding them to pieces with wooden pestles, because none of their royal blood must be spilt on the ground, it being, by their religion, thought great impiety to contaminate the divine blood by mixing it with earth.?EWhen Kublai Khan defeated and took his uncle Nayan, who had rebelled against him, he caused Nayan to be put to death by being wrapt in a carpet and tossed to and fro till he died, ?because he would not have the blood of his Line Imperial spilt upon the ground or exposed in the eye of Heaven and before the Sun.?E?Friar Ricold mentions the Tartar maxim: ?One Khan will put another to death to get possession of the throne, but he takes great care that the blood be not spilt. For they say that it is highly improper that the blood of the Great Khan should be spilt upon the ground; so they cause the victim to be smothered somehow or other.?EThe like feeling prevails at the court of Burma, where a peculiar mode of execution without bloodshed is reserved for princes of the blood.??

This was not necessarily a fear of killing. Blood should not have contact with the ground, though it might well be disposed of in other ways. Frazer yet again: ?Marco Polo tells us that in his day persons caught in the streets of Cambaluc (Peking) at unseasonable hours were arrested, and if found guilty of a misdemeanor were beaten with a stick. ?Under this punishment people sometimes die, but they adopt it in order to eschew bloodshed, for their Bacsis say that it is an evil thing to shed man?s blood.?EIn West Sussex people believe that the ground on which human blood has been shed is accursed and will remain barren for ever. Among some primitive peoples, when the blood of a tribesman has to be spilt it is not suffered to fall upon the ground, but is received upon the bodies of his fellow-tribesmen. Thus in some Australian tribes boys who are being circumcised are laid on a platform, formed by the living bodies of the tribesmen; and when a boy?s tooth is knocked out as an initiatory ceremony, he is seated on the shoulders of a man, on whose breast the blood flows and may not be wiped away. ?Also the Gauls used to drink their enemies?Eblood and paint themselves therewith. So also they write that the old Irish were wont; and so have I seen some of the Irish do, but not their enemies?Ebut friends?Eblood, as, namely, at the execution of a notable traitor at Limerick, called Murrogh O?Brien, I saw an old woman, which was his foster-mother, take up his head whilst he was quartered and suck up all the blood that ran thereout, saying that the earth was not worthy to drink it, and therewith also steeped her face and breast and tore her hair, crying out and shrieking most terribly.?EAmong the Latuka of Central Africa the earth on which a drop of blood has fallen at childbirth is carefully scraped up with an iron shovel, put into a pot along with the water used in washing the mother, and buried tolerably deep outside the house on the left-hand side. In West Africa, if a drop of your blood has fallen on the ground, you must carefully cover it up, rub and stamp it into the soil; if it has fallen on the side of a canoe or a tree, the place is cut out and the chip destroyed. One motive of these African customs may be a wish to prevent the blood from falling into the hands of magicians, who might make an evil use of it.?E

As some of Frazer?s comments make clear, there is no universal prohibition on the consumption of blood, though that might be forbidden under certain circumstances. Jacob Milgrom claims that the Hebrew Bible is unique in its total and insistent prohibition of eating blood. We shall return to this biblical prohibition later.

By ?leaking blood,?EI have specific reference to menstruation, which has almost universally been seen as a defilement. Frazer summarizes some of the evidence: ?THE MOTIVE for the restraints so commonly imposed on girls at puberty is the deeply engrained dread which primitive man universally entertains of menstruous blood. He fears it at all times but especially on its first appearance; hence the restrictions under which women lie at their first menstruation are usually more stringent than
those which they have to observe at any subsequent recurrence of the mysterious flow . . . . as the terror, for it is nothing less, which the phenomenon periodically strikes into the mind of the savage has deeply influenced his life and institutions, it may be well to illustrate the subject with some further examples . . . . Thus in the Encounter Bay tribe of South Australia there is, or used to be, a ?superstition which obliges a woman to separate herself from the camp at the time of her monthly illness, when if a young man or boy should approach, she calls out, and he immediately makes a circuit to avoid her. If she is neglectful upon this point, she exposes herself to scolding, and sometimes to severe beating by her husband or nearest relation, because the boys are told from their infancy, that if they see the blood they will early become grey-headed, and their strength will fail prematurely.?EThe Dieri of Central Australia believe that if women at these times were to eat fish or bathe in a river, the fish would all die and the water would dry up. The Arunta of the same region forbid menstruous women to gather the irriakura bulbs, which form a staple article of diet for both men and women. They think that were a woman to break this rule, the supply of bulbs would fail. In some Australian tribes the seclusion of menstruous women was even more rigid, and was enforced by severer penalties than a scolding or a beating. Thus ?there is a regulation relating to camps in the Wakelbura tribe which forbids the women coming into the encampment by the same path as the men. Any violation of this rule would in a large camp be punished with death. The reason for this is the dread with which they regard the menstrual period of women. During such a time, a woman is kept entirely away from the camp, half a mile at least. A woman in such a condition has boughs of some tree of her totem tied round her loins, and is constantly watched and guarded, for it is thought that should any male be so unfortunate as to see a woman in such a condition, he would die. If such a woman were to let herself be seen by a man, she would probably be put to death. When the woman has recovered, she is painted red and white, her head covered with feathers, and returns to the camp?E?EThe Bushmen of South Africa think that, by a glance of a girl?s eye at the time when she ought to be kept in strict retirement, men become fixed in whatever positions they happen to occupy, with whatever they were holding in their hands, and are changed into trees that talk. Cattle-rearing tribes of South Africa hold that their cattle would die if the milk were drunk by a menstruous woman; and they fear the same disaster if a drop of her blood were to fall on the ground and the oxen were to pass over it. To prevent such a calamity women in general, not menstruous women only, are forbidden to enter the cattle enclosure; and more than that, they may not use the ordinary paths in entering the village or in passing from one hut to another. They are obliged to make circuitous tracks at the back of the huts in order to avoid the ground in the middle of the village where the cattle stand or lie down. These women?s tracks may be seen at every Caffre village.?E

What shall we make of these prohibitions that treat blood as a defilement? Mary Douglas has offered one of the most widely employed theories to explain these blood defilements. Douglas defines ?dirt?Eas ?matter out of place.?E On her view, what defiles and provokes revulsion is less the substance itself and more the place where the substance appears. Thus, a banana peel on the sidewalk or an apple core on a chair is dirty; neither is considered ?dirt?Ewhen it is part of a banana or apple. When it is properly disposed of in the garbage, it still offends our senses, but it does not evoke disgust or concerns of defilement. When we speak of bodily fluids such as blood, this same principle holds. Blood is perfectly fine in its place, and its place is within the confines of your skin. When it begins to be spilled out, or begins to leak out, then it is dirty, matter out of place. Following Durkheim, Douglas also relates impurity to social order. Matter out of place symbolizes people out of their proper social place. Dirt seems dangerous because dirt means disorder. Cultures systematically order and classify matter, and dirt is what violates that classification. Blood outside the body has transgressed the bounds of the physical body, and this represents transgression of social boundaries. The social body is symbolically threatened when the physical body?s boundaries are permeable.

To quote Douglas: ?there are beliefs that each sex is a danger to the other through contact with sexual fluids. According to other beliefs only one sex is endangered by contact with the other, usually males from females, rather than the reverse. Such patterns of sexual danger can be seen to express symmetry and hierarchy. It is plausible to interpret them as expressing something about the actual relation of the sexes. I suggest that many ideas about sexual dangers are better interpreted as symbols of the relation between parts of society, as mirroring designs of hierarchy or symmetry which apply in the larger social system. What goes for sex pollution also goes for bodily pollution. The two sexes can serve as a model for the collaboration and distinctiveness of social units. So also can the bodily processes of ingestion portray political absorption. Sometimes bodily orifices seem to represent points of entry or exit to social units, or bodily perfection can symbolize an ideal theocracy?E( Purity and Danger , 3-4).

Again, ?The body is a complex structure. The functions of its different parts and their relation afford a source of symbols for other complex structures. We cannot possibly interpret rituals concerning execrate, breast milk, saliva and the rest unless we are prepared to see in the body a symbol of society, and to see the powers and dangers credited to social structure reproduced in small on the human body?E(p. 115). Again, ?all margins are dangerous . . . . Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins. We should expect the orifices of the body to symbolize its specially vulnerable points. Matter issuing from them is marginal stuff of the most obvious kind. Spittle, blood, milk, urine, faeces or tears by simply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body . . . The mistake is to treat bodily margins in isolation from all other margins.?E Sh isolates four kings of social pollution, symbolized by bodily pollution: ?danger pressing on external boundaries?Eanger from transgressing the internal lines of the system?Eanger in the margins of the lines?Eanger from internal contradiction?E(p. 122).

A second theory of blood impurity gets us into the second broad area where blood and culture meet, the issue of blood kinship. Here, Claude Levi-Strauss rather than Douglas is important. Levi-Strauss sees various binary oppositions in parallel:

Raw cooked
Menstruating Non-Menstruating
Kinship Marriage
Bloody Non-Bloody

Let me attempt an explanation. Menstruating women are like ?raw?Emeat in that both are leaking blood. To use Chris Knight?s terminology (in Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture ), ?women who were safely available as sexual partners ought logically to have been thought of as blood-free or ?cooked.?E Put another way, we can say that to be with one?s kin ?Eone?s ?blood?E?Ewould have been to be in a ?raw?Estate, while conjoining with one?s spouse or lover would have involved becoming ?cooked.?? Thus, Levi-Strauss claims that ?raw is to cooked as kinship is to marriage.?E Behind these oppositions is the fundamental structuralist opposition of Nature and Culture, nature lining up with raw food, kinship relations, bleeding women; culture lined with cooked food, marriage, and non-menstruating women.

Famously, he sees the problems of blood kinship reflected in the Oedipus myth. He arranges the elemen
ts of the myth in four columns. The first represents actions that embody an overestimation of blood relation; the second an underestimation; the third actions that represent an attack on the autochthonous origins of man (man originating from Earth, like plants); and the fourth an affirmation of man?s autochthonous origins. Thus, Oedipus overestimates the blood bond in marrying his mother, and this overestimation is a defilement; yet, he also becomes a source of plague because he kills Laios, underestimating the blood kinship with his father. Killing the Sphinx is implicitly an attack on the notion of autochthonous origins, since the Sphinx, like most monsters, is a chthonic figure. The fact that Oedipus limps reminds him of his autochthonous origins, since myths commonly show men newly born from earth having difficulty walking. The Oedipus myth does not determine the answer to the opposition that arises between overvaluation and undervaluation of blood kinship. Rather, it ?has to do with the inability, for a culture which holds the belief that mankind is autochthonous ?Eto find a satisfactory transition between this theory and the knowledge that human beings are actually born from a union of man and woman . . . . the Oedipus myth provides a kind of logical tool which relates the original problem ?Eborn from one or born from two? ?Eto the derivative problem: born from different or born from same? By a correlation of this type, the overrating of blood relations is to the underrating of blood relations as the attempt to escape autochthony is to the impossibility to succeed in it.?E Blood kinship, in short, binds the person, so that he seeks escape; but the escape is impossible. Thus, the Oedipus myth explores issues of blood and kinship, and symbolizes their paradoxical status.

Levi-Strauss?Estress on blood kinship has not gone unchallenged. In 1984, David Schneider published A Critique of the Study of Kinship , in which he baldly declared that ?kinship,?Elike totemism, the matrilineal complex and matriarchy, is a non-subject since it does not exist in any culture known to man.?E It is instead an artifact of the anthropologists?Emental apparatus, and a part of European ideology that the anthropologist brings to his study of primitive peoples. At the heart of Schneider?s critique was a critique of the underlying assumption that ?Blood is thicker than water.?E He points out that kinship is usually understood to rest on the simple fact of blood kinship ?Ecommon descent. But, Schneider argues, ?If the blood relationship is presumed to have inherent qualities of its own which ?are?Eand which ?exist?Eand are so strong and take such precedence, then adoption ought not to be possible, or at most is should be unusual and rarely practiced. For adoption creates ?kinship?Ewhere none in fact exists, that is, no real blood relationship exists. Hence there ought to be a clear cultural distinction between true kinship and all other kinds of relationship.?E If a bond between adopted child and parent is as strong as that between a biological child and parent, ?there would be no reason why the distinction between adoptive, putative, fictive relationship and ?true?Eor ?real?Erelationship should be so consistently drawn, as it has for the past hundred years or more.?E The notion of an underlying ?factitive?Ekinship, based in blood, is simply an item in the belief system of the anthropologist.

The development of Western kin conceptions in the early centuries of Christendom provides a good example of Schneider?s point. According to Jack Goody, there was a marked prominence given to ?spiritual kinship?Eover ?natural kinship?Efrom the late fourth century on. In part, this was a product of the introduction of godparents into baptismal rites. Originally, parents served as sponsors at baptism (still true in Augustine?s time), but over the following centuries parents were replaced by others who took a certain parental role in relation to the baptized. As Goody says, godparenthood ?was a form of quasi-kinship that substituted spiritual for material considerations; no longer were rights to property necessarily involved, although help and patronage might be. Baptism thus became a kind of adoption.?E

The strength and reality of ?spiritual?Ekinship can be gauged by church discussions of whether marriage to ?spiritual kin?Econstituted incest. Justinian determined that it was: ?We prohibit absolutely a marriage between a godfather and dog-daughter . . . For nothing demands so much parental affection and impedes marriage as a tie of this kind, which through the mediation of God binds these two souls together. So did the Eastern Church Council In Tullo held in Constantinople in 692: ?Whereas the spiritual relationship is greater than fleshly affinity; and since it has come to our knowledge that in some places certain persons who become sponsors to children in holy salvation-bearing baptism, afterward contract matrimony with their mothers (being widows), we decree that for the future nothing of this sort is to be done. But if any, after the present canon, shall be observed to do this, they must, in the first place, desist from this unlawful marriage, and then be subjected to the penalties of fornicators.?E In the West, Gregory told Augustine that there was no bar to marriage among spiritual kin. In his typically commonsensical way, he explained: ?I cannot possibly understand how, on the one hand, spiritual relationship in the case of matrimonial intercourse can be so great a sin, while, on the other hand, it is well established that by holy baptism we all become sons and daughters, brothers and sisters of Christ and the Church.?E

The Reformers condemned these restrictions, Luther of course more vigorously than anyone: ?If I sponsor a girl at baptism or confirmation, then neither I nor my son may marry her, or her mother, or her sister ?Eunless an appropriate and substantial sum of money is forthcoming! This is but pure farce and foolishness, concocted for the sake of money and to befuddle consciences.?E If spiritual kinship is a bar to marriage, he added, ?then I must be forbidden to marry any Christian woman, since all baptized women are spiritual sister of all baptized men by virtue of their common baptism, sacrament, faith, Spirit, Lord, God and eternal life.?E Behind this condemnation, however, is the more fundamental point that makes baptism itself rather than godparenthood the key ritual of Christian kinship. This radicalized and extends spiritual kinship rather than undermining it. At the same time, the Reformation also brought a renewed stress on the blood-kin bond between parents and children. Thomas Becon, chaplain to Thomas Cranmer, complained that the Catholic Church no longer allowed fathers to be present at the baptism of their own children. Just as, it was argued, a mother should nurse her own child, so a father should be present at the baptism of his children. In this way, it might be argued that the Reformation reoriented kin concepts in the West toward the biases unmasked by Schneider; it would be interesting to explore how far the Reformation is responsible for the tendency to take blood relations as ?fact?Eand other sorts of kinship as ?fiction.?E Unfortunately, I cannot explore that today.

SAVED BY THE BLOOD
When we look back at Lower and Denis?Eexperiments in the light of these prohibitions and blood-related fears, we are struck by the daring of these early blood researchers. From an anthropological viewpoint, the spilling or leaking of blood is dangerous, and the consumption of blood, whether by mouth or through a vein, is also dangerous, at least in some circumstances. At one end of the transfusion, you face Douglas?Etheory: Leakage of bodily fluids raises the specter of transgression of social boundaries. At the receiving end of the transfusion, you face Levi-Strauss?Etheory: The recipient is receiving the rawest of the raw, pure blood. As I mentioned, the Pope eventually forbade transfusions, and until very recently the Jehovah?s Witnesses have held out
very strongly with religiously-based objections to receiving blood (based largely on Gen 9 and Acts 15). Those sorts of religious reactions seem more normal, anthropologically speaking, than our easy acceptance of blood drives and blood donations. Our lack of fear about leaking blood into a tube, allowing it to pass the boundaries of our sin; and our lack of concern about letting out blood be ?ingested?Einto the veins of someone else ?Ethese point to a significant shift in the sociology and culture of blood, and a radical shift in civilization generally.

Of course, I believe that these shifts are due ultimately due to the influence of the gospel. Let me suggest several theological points that might count as historical, cultural, and intellectual preconditions to the Lower-Denis experiments and the contemporary global network of blood donation. First, it is true that the first commandment issued to mankind after the fall is a prohibition of eating blood (Gen 9), and this prohibition is reiterated strenuously in the Levitical law (Lev 17). This prohibition continues to stand, at least in the Apostolic period, as a restriction on both Jews and Gentiles (Acts 15). More fundamentally, however, the gospel reverses this prohibition, since the central act of Christian worship involves the ingestion of blood.

Ingestion of the blood of Jesus, second, rests on the still more fundamental fact that Jesus?Eblood is restorative, life-giving, and cleansing rather than defiling. Blood from bulls and goats did cleanse the flesh under the OC (Heb 9), and blood was given for cleansing and atonement (Lev 16; 17). Yet, the blood of human beings did not cleanse. It always defiled. From the blood of Abel that calls out for vengeance; to the blood of the Hebrew children that call up the Avenger who seeks to kill Moses at the border of Egypt; to the blood of a man slain on the land of promise that provokes the ?near kinsman?Eto act as avenger ?Ein all these OC scenarios, the spilling of human blood defiles. Now human blood is spilled and it cleanses. And for that reason we drink it.

Finally, the blood of the new covenant reconstitutes kinship. Here, I rely on the provocative exegesis of 1 John 5:7 found in David Cunningham?s These Three Are One . He points out that, even if the explicit Trinitarian reference is discounted, we are still left with the ?strange quasi-mathematical equation of three and one.?E He proposes that we take that in its full paradoxical glory, rather than weaken ?one?Eto ?cohere?Eor ?are in agreement.?E The passage thus contains a veiled Trinitarian reference, if not an explicit one. More, the text calls attention to the three ?earthly witnesses?Eof the ?Spirit, water, and blood.?E Taking the ?blood?Eas a Eucharistic reference, Cunningham suggests that the Eucharist is an earthly witness to the Triune unity. As we all commonly partake of the blood, we are bound together so that many are one, just as ?These three are one.?E A genuine ?kinship of blood?Eis established, through the blood of Jesus, which is the blood of God.

Later in his book, Cunningham adds this: ?We all have blood; it is essential to our lives; and it needs to be shared with others. Christ?s willing donation of blood is a gift to us, but also a reminder of that which binds us together. People once mingled their blood as a sign of profound mutual participation; today, it seems a much more negative symbol, as the carrier of disease from one organism to another. But this too can be a reminder of the profound meaning of the Eucharistic event: we are ?sharing blood?Ewith those with whom we have gathered. For many, this is a frightening thought indeed. Nevertheless, the blood that binds us together is a chief reference point of the eucharist, by which it draws us into mutually constitutive relationships with one another that can reflect, however dimly, the mutual participation of the triune God.?E

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