In the previous chapters we have explored the belief-system related to blood in a supernatural context, where it embodied the dichotomy of life and death. Considering blood as a prominent symbol of survival, we can summarize the discussion on the power it represented in three points:
- blood as the life-force, which both the witch and the supernatural being attempted to waste.
- blood as the vehicle for the soul, and, specifically in this context the Christian one, which the devil or non human creatures such as fairies, desired above everything else. - the physical stereotyping of the harmful agent, the aggressive intruder, which, lacking the living substance, was often described as dried, very old, monstrous. Two further conclusions emerge from these concepts: a description of the body as a permeable structure, in which external and internal agents influenced each other; and, what seems to be, an idea of blood as a fundamental limited good which needed to be preserved. As we will see more clearly later the first idea finds its confirmation in the popular and learned medicine of the time; while the latter, which survived in folklore, is far more complex.
Being the fluid of life it seems obvious that blood should not escape from its bodily margins, that it was a symbol of preservation and strength inside the veins, while it became the negative evidence of weakness and waste when poured outside. Also the medical world was not free from religious and spiritual speculation, where blood represented the means of the pact between God and the individual, bringing salvation into the mortal nature. Therefore shedding blood could be interpreted as the desacralisation of it and of the soul contained inside man. The diminution of life, implied by a blood-loss, corresponded to the escaping of the enlivening, divine breath, which was preserved integral in the sealed blood.212
If we consider early modern medical theories we will see that the ambivalence of blood did not involve only its abundance or scarcity inside the body, but also its inner qualities and ideas of richness, putrefaction or corruption. Alan Dundes employed the
212
Giorgio Cosmacini, La religiosità della medicina. Dall’antichità ad oggi. (Bari: Laterza, 2007), pp. 85-86
109 notion of a limited amount of bodily fluids in the definition of a “wet and dry” symbolism at the base of both the belief in the dangerous dead, such as vampires and revenants, and the Indo-European folklore of the evil eye. Humidity symbolized a healthy state of life, opposed to the withering of the bones, representing decay. Following this idea, the evil eye, the capacity to harm through sight, involved people with a weak or old constitution harming people with a young, healthier one.213 Turning to the origins of this discourse we find the Neoplatonic movement of the Renaissance, where medicine merged into philosophy, and blood was placed at the centre of the maintenance of physical welfare. In the words of its most important exponent, Marsilio Ficino: “Vita est per humiditatem, mors per siccitatem”, the life contained in the blood and in the bodily liquids was in opposition to the dryness of death. This contrast developed in the theories regarding the process of ageing, according to which although it was inevitable, it was not completely irreversible. Youth and old age were not only reflected in the appearance of the body, but coincided with the richness or the poverty of the blood it concealed. The thirteenth- century philosopher, Roger Bacon, whose work was reprinted during the seventeenth century, asserted that the only effective medicine against ageing was youth itself. Ficino and his contemporaries went further, discussing youth and health as bodily substances which dwelt in the blood and that could be restored through the same liquid: "There is a power in human blood to both attract and, in turn, to follow human blood”.214
Thus young blood could be recommended to old people as a remedy to prolong life. Renaissance and early modern doctors advised to draw and conserve blood as a vital quintessence, especially from young men of healthy and sturdy constitution; to consume drinks which resembled blood such as red wine or milk; to eat the flesh of long-lived animals. By contrast sexual intercourse, which constituted a loss of male fluids, was considered dangerous by Ficino, and doctors up to the eighteenth century advised moderation in sexual activities to avoid the complete drainage of the body.215
213
Alan Dundes, “Wet and Dry, the Evil Eye: An Essay in Indo-European and Semitic Worldview.” In Alan Dundes (ed.), The Evil Eye: A Casebook. (Wisconsin University Press: 1982), pp. 257-312; Alan Dundes, “The Vampire as Bloodthirsty Revenant: A Psychoanalytic Post Mortem.” In Alan Dundes, (ed.), The Vampire. A Casebook, (Wisconsin University Press:1998), pp. 159-170
214
Roger Bacon, The cure of old age and preservation of youth. (London: 1683),pp. 99-100; Marsilio Ficino, Three Books of Life, p. 199
215
Piero Camporesi, Il sugo della vita, pp. 38-40; Marsilio Ficino, Three Books of Life, pp. 122-125; Tobias Whitaker, The tree of hvmane life, or, The blovd of the grape : proving the possibilitie of
110 Doctor Du Laurens, writing at the end of the sixteenth century, explained old age as a disease curable to certain extent, whose seed every human being bore internally.216 Following similar “prolongevist” theories the earliest attempts at transfusion were enthusiastically conducted on animals at the end of the seventeenth century, in the attempt to reinforce life.217 Though influenced by the discovery of the circular movement of the blood by William Harvey, the belief in the efficacy of transfusion had its root in the tradition that considered blood as the central element of youth and health. The main idea at work here entailed the replacement of both a lost, dried blood, with a new rich stream, and of weak for strong blood. The distinction is subtle, but significant: if blood seemed the elixir of long life and the most effective remedy for every disease, this derived not so much from the fluid itself as from its qualities and the “substances” that it carried. The first one to practise transfusion was the French doctor Jean-Baptiste Denys, who in 1667 transfused blood from a lamb into the veins of a boy. The patient had suffered a long fever, losing strength and his mental lucidity. He was also affected by a kind of lethargy, the origin of which was attributed to the scarcity of the blood left in his body after the abnormal ebullition of the feverish state. After the transfusion of new blood the boy acquired new energy and lost the desire to sleep continuously. The practice inspired enthusiasm in the medical field, but was also seen as controversial and abandoned soon after due to the theological aberration it constituted. In fact it disrupted the sacral state of blood, considering it just as a bodily product and not as the vehicle of the divine. For the Christian religion the transfused blood was seen as the antagonist of life, deprived of the soul deriving from God.218 Henceforth an apparent contradiction dwelled in the substance of blood: on one side its corporeal nature, endangered by time and sickness, on the other the eternity which, through the soul, linked it directly to the otherworld and to the image of Christ. We will discuss the physical theories of blood first, to see consequently how moral and spiritual features converged in to them.
A consumptive notion of the body and of life, strictly linked to blood, was present in Galen’s humoral theory and in Greek philosophy, which deeply influenced the
(London: 1638), p. 30; Leonardus Lessius, A Treatise of health and long life with the future means of
attaining it. Translated by Timothy Smith. (London: 1743), pp. 63-65.
216
Andreas Du Laurens, A discourse of the preservation of the sight; of melancholike diseases; of
rheumes, and of old age. (London: 1599), pp. 172, 186-187.
217
John Lowthorp, The Philosophical Transactions and Collections to the end of the Year 1700,
Abridg'd and Dispos'd under the General Heads. 2nd ed., Vol. 3. (London: 1731), p. 230
218
111 medieval and early modern medicine, but it was the Arab physician Avicenna, during the tenth century, who gave a clear explanation. According to it the human being was born with a limited amount of radical moisture, deriving from the sperm, a perfected form of blood, and contained in the humours. During life it was dried up by the vital heat, the active principle of existence and of the soul in the body. The Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino adopted this theory locating the two fundamental substances expressly in the blood; he discussed how ageing and death derived from the consummation of the moisture by the heat, but also how an excessive richness of humidity could be equally dangerous, causing the corruption of the blood and leading to the putrefaction of the flesh. Peter Niebyl has affirmed that the idea was somehow disappearing in the early modern times, yet it is more correct to say that it became implicit, absorbed in the mentality of people and in the medical world.219 During the second half of the seventeenth century the eclectic Nicolò Serpetro, a Sicilian priest, writer and natural philosopher, still acknowledged the myth of a wonderful lamp, made with human blood, which, once it had been lit, burned until the vital wind was sealed inside the individual which it represented. If the flame was strong and high it meant that the man was spiritually and physically healthy, while if it was weak and trembling it indicated not only corporeal sickness, but also sadness, fear and loneliness.220 In the seventeenth century Nicholas Culpeper, relying on both learned and popular sources, still affirmed: “All medicines working by a manifest way, perform their office by heat or cold, moisturing or drying”.221 Diseases and cures did not act directly on the organs, but on the blood and on its vital properties, wasting or restoring them.
The idea of the radical moisture and the natural heat was linked to the Galenic theories which understood health as the result of the right humoral balance, and the Aristotelian conception of a tripartite soul. If we consider further this representation of the body, it will appear as a container of vital forces, where the entering substances could either feed or hinder, in the same way in which the escaping ones could weaken or purify. Food, transformed into chyle in the stomach, was directed to the liver and there was concocted, replenishing the radical moisture and begetting the four
219
Peter Niebyl, “Old Age, Fever and the Lamp Metaphor.” Journal of the History of Medicine. Vol.26, No. 4 (Oct., 1971), pp. 351-368. Marsilio Ficino, Three Books, pp. 168-175.
220
Niccolò Serpetro, Il mercato delle meraviglie della natura. Overo Istoria naturale. (Venezia: Tomasini, 1653), p. 15
221
Nicholas Culpeper, Febrilia or A Treatise of Fevers in Generall. (1656), p. 39. In Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper’s Last Legacy. (London, 1657)
112 humours: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. The four humours were further inscribed in an interpretive system of external and symbolic correspondences, which linked them both to the four elements, air, water, fire and earth; and the four ages of man, while the radical moisture and the vital heat determined their distinctive qualities. Therefore blood was hot and wet; phlegm was cold and wet; yellow bile was hot and dry, while black bile was cold and dry. Blood was believed to be attracted by the different organs and bodily parts which required it: it did not circulate, but “ebbed and flowed”, according to a kind of tidal movement. Coursing through the veins it irrigated the bodily parts and was consumed by them. The stream which reached the right ventricle of the heart divided in two: one portion flowed through the pulmonary artery into the lungs; and the other crossed the heart to the left ventricle and was heated and replenished by air in a “spirituous blood”, before continuing its travel.222 The brain, the liver and the heart were considered the most important organs, connected to the animal, vital and natural spirits which expressed the work of the soul. In the words of Robert Burton:
Spirit is a most subtle vapour, which is expressed from the blood, and the instrument of the soul, to perform all his actions; a common tie or medium between the body and the soul (…). Of these spirits there be three kinds, according to the three principal parts, brain, heart, liver; natural, vital, animal. The natural are begotten in the liver, and thence dispersed through the veins, to perform those natural actions. The vital spirits are made in the heart of the natural, which by the arteries are transported to all the other parts (…). The animal spirits, formed of the vital, brought up to the brain, and diffused by the nerves to the subordinate members, give sense and motion to them.223
Thus, even if the spirits were the expression of the reasonable soul coming from God, they were not formed by a “celestial substance”, but by a corruptible, vaporous matter, which retained a physical origin and needed nourishment to be preserved. In this order of things we can agree with the assertion that the type of body and the
222
For a description of the Galenic system see: Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early
Modern Europe. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 69. Bernard Seeman, The River of Life. The story of man’s blood from magic to science. (London: 1962), p. 101; Roy Porter, Blood and Guts. A Short History of Medicine. (London Penguin Books: 2002), pp. 26-30, 59.
223
113 qualities of its humours were the changing factors which allowed sickness to develop, while all the diseases were at last reducible to one. In fact we had many kinds of bodies for just one variable sickness, which depended on the healthy or corrupted nature of the humours. Sir Francis Bacon in his History naturall and experimentall of
life and death. Or of the prolongation of life, described the process of ageing thus:
Age is nothing of it selfe; being onely the measure of time: That which causeth the Effect, is the native Spirit of bodies, which sucketh up the moisture of the body, and then, together with it, flyeth forth; and the Aire ambient, which multiplieth it selfe, upon the native Spirits, and jayees of the body, and preyeth upon them.
Bacon added that the “matter of reparation”, that is whatever replenished the blood and consequently all the spirits, could be eternal, but not so the instruments of this reparation. The “drier and most porous parts”, like the sinews, the veins, the membranes, the arteries, the bowels, through which the blood and the spirits nourished and restored the body, tended to dissolution.224 In such a precarious and limited body, the blood stood as the matter of continuity between life and death, linking generation to consumption and putrefaction. Thus the danger of disease derived not always from a lack of blood, but from a deviant behaviour of it, that caused corruption instead of the preservation of a vital balance.
Putrefaction itself was generative. Toads, worms, and other kinds of repulsive creatures were believed to proliferate in stagnating waters as in corrupted blood. So for example in Italian folklore putrefied menstrual blood begot basilisks and monsters. The late sixteenth-century Italian magician and natural philosopher Giovan Battista Della Porta shared the old tradition according to which snakes could come out from the human flesh and marrow, while unknown animals could be born from decayed earth. The German philosopher and magician Cornelius Agrippa similarly argued that the hair of menstruated women placed under a dung-heap could generate snakes. In the words of the philosopher Tommaso Campanella, which encapsulate well all these wonderful beliefs, death was only a transformation: though the living
224
Francis Bacon, History naturall and experimentall of life and death. Or of the prolongation of life. (London: 1638), Preface, pp. 28-29
114 spirit, the soul, was lost, the dull matter remained.225 On the other hand healthy blood was in many cases considered the best healing means. The sixteenth-century physician Lennio, discussed blood as the better of the juices, good for example to stop the spasms of epileptic patients, or to be distilled in a “salt” against every physical pain. Bacon, though rejecting it, mentioned the medieval belief that a bath of infants’ blood could cure leprosy and the putrefied flesh; Culpeper inserted in his collection of remedies the use of the blood from a one-year-old kid freshly killed, to break “the stone in the body”. They also both suggested, with less morbid tones, the employment of human milk, as a replenishing, rich and purer derivation of blood.226 Considering blood we can see how medical ideas tangled with magical ones: these beliefs were in fact at the basis of the late medieval accusation to Jews, which we have discussed in the first chapter, and partially nurtured the world of witchcraft. The properties of blood, but also its presence and its quality inside the body, could determine the moral behaviour of the human being. Good blood, being the symbol of health and spiritual innocence, was opposite to bad blood, which instead of targeting the weakness of the individual became the physical evidence of his dangerousness. Up to the eighteenth century this view of the body as ruled by “bad” or “good” blood was still accepted in some medical circles; George Cheyne is his treatise on long life wrote:
The Grand Secret, and Sole Mean of Long Life, is, To keep the Blood and Juices in a due State of Thinness and Fluidity, whereby they may be able to make those Rounds and Circulations through the animal Fibres, wherein Life and Health consist, with the fewest Rubs, and least Resistance, than may be.227
The probable reason for the longevity of this belief, despite the discovery of the circulation of blood in 1628, which undermined the Galenic model, relied on the Aristotelian theory of the spirits which Harvey also accepted. He followed the
225
Giovan Battista Della Porta, Della magia naturale, libri XX. (Napoli, 1677), Book II, pp. 41-42; Cornelius Heinrich Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy. Translated out of the Latin into the English Tongue by J.F. (London, 1651), Book 1, p. 108; Tommaso Campanella, Del senso delle cose e
della magia. (Bari: Laterza, 1925), p. 254; Piero Camporesi, La carne impassibile, pp. 92-100
226
Levinus Lennius,The touchstone of complexions generallye appliable, expedient and profitable for all such, as be desirous & carefull of their bodylye health. First written in Latine, by Leuine Lemnie; and now Englished by Thomas :ewton. (London, 1576), p. 71, 108; Francis Bacon, History naturall and experimentall, p. 330; Nicholas Culpeper, Febrilia, pp. 22, 33
227
115 anatomical studies of Renaissance medicine, which, in the person of the Flemish physician Andreas Vesalius had already challenged some of the Galenic theories,