Content area
Full Text
BLOOD: AN EPIC HISTORY OF MEDICINE AND COMMERCE by Douglas Starr Alfred A. Knopf, 1998 441 pages; $27.50
THE GETTYSBURG BATTLEFIELD, A stone's throw from my campus office, was the site of a great bloodletting, yet until I read Douglas Starr's spellbinding medical and social history of blood, I had no idea how great a tragedy it was. Civil War soldiers, no matter how grievously wounded, did not as a rule receive blood transfusions; few physicians knew how to perform the procedure. Indeed, since the days of ancient Greece, physicians had thought that draining the blood would bring the four bodily humors into balance, but they had not considered the potential benefits of pumping blood back in.
By the time of the...