Bloodstone

“ Most of that known at the present time comes from India and China.
Bloodstone is a variety of plasma containing spots of red jasper looking like drops of blood. Another name for bloodstone by which it was chiefly known by the ancients is heliotrope. This name is derived from two Greek words meaning “sun turning” and refers to the belief that the stone when immersed in water changes the image of the sun to blood red. The stone was often used by the ancients for carvings representing the head of Christ, and one fine specimen of such work may be seen in the Field Columbian Museum. ”

“ The hemorrhage is said to have ceased immediately.508
The bloodstone was used as a remedy by the Indians of New Spain, and Monardes notes that they often cut the material into the shape of hearts. This seems a very appropriate form for an object used to check hemorrhages. The best effect was attained when the stone was first dipped in cold water and then held by the patient in his right hand. Of course the application of any cold object would serve to congeal the blood, but the connection with the heart vanishes in the direction to place the stone in the right hand. ”

“ The blood-stone, the Heliotropium of the ancients, from the occasional small specks or points of a blood-red colour exhibited on its green surface, is even at this very day employed in many parts of England and Scotland, to stop a bleeding from the nose ”

“ As theories supporting bloodletting grew more complex, so too did the instruments.
Spontaneous forms of bleeding, including nosebleed, menstruation, and those instances produced by a blow to any part of the body, apparently inspired the earliest human bloodletters. The Egyptians claimed that the hippopotamus rubbed its leg against a sharp reed until it bled to remove excess blood from its body. [1] The Peruvians noted that a bat would take blood from the toe of a sleeping person when the opportunity presented itself. A deer, and goat, would pick a place near its diseased eye for relief. ”

“ The blood in bleeder cases is, as a rule, normal, so far as our present means of investigation enable us to decide. When a hemorrhage has continued for some time, it is thin and watery, but at the beginning of the bleeding the blood is usually rich in corpuscles and fibrin and coagulates firmly. ”

“ If the strength admit of bloodletting, we are to abstract blood from the arm immediately and freely; but, if the patient be delirious and will not present his arm, or if there be apprehension of hemorrhage after the bleeding from the patient tearing his arm during the agitation of his delirium, we must open the straight vein in the forehead, and take away at once a sufficient quantity of blood. We are to use clysters [361] and injections of oil, or rose-oil with the juice of ptisan. When watchfulness prevails, we anoint the head with rose-oil, or with vinegar and rose-oil ”

“ Many and many a life has been saved by this conduct on the part of our medical staff, for if an important artery is severed by a bullet or shell-splinter a man may easily bleed to death in ten minutes. I have myself on one occasion in Crete seen jets of blood escaping from the femoral artery of a Turkish soldier, without being able to render him any assistance. In short, it is believed that quite three-fifths of those who perish on a battle-field die from loss of blood. ”

“ In this period it was considered an art to hold the lancet properly and to support the arm of the patient with delicacy and grace. [57] Many patients had by [Pg 12] repeated bloodlettings become inured to its potential danger and unpleasantness. In the mid-eighteenth century one British physician declared: “People are so familiarized to bleeding that they cannot easily conceive any hurt or danger to ensue, and therefore readily submit, when constitutional fear is out of the question, to the opening of a vein, however unskillfully advised.” ”

“ The poor wretch saw the instruments handed one by one by the assistant, and heard the surgeon’s calm directions and his remarks on the case. The barbarous practice of arresting bleeding by the application of red-hot irons to the surface of the wound had indeed ceased three centuries before, when that humane reformer, Paré, 90 displaced it with the method of tying the open blood-vessel, but the patient’s blood gushed forth before him until arrested, into the sawdust spread to receive it, and the sight and the hot odour of it oftentimes mercifully caused him to faint. ”

“ Going apart by themselves, at some distance from their settlements, they would lacerate their bodies, in order that blood might flow freely; and, laying a series of stones in a row, they would walk over them, allowing their blood to fall upon them. The young woman who could cover the largest number of stones with her blood, had the fairest prospect in life, in the line of a woman’s peculiar mission. This certainly would be a not unnatural thought as an outgrowth of the belief that stones [308] anointed with freely surrendered blood, can be made to have life in themselves. ”

“ Bleeding as a mutilation has an origin akin to the origins of other mutilations. Did we not find that some uncivilized tribes, as the Samoyeds, drink the warm blood of animals—did we not find among existing cannibals, such as the Feejeeans, proofs that savages drink the blood of still-living human victims—it would seem incredible that from taking the blood of a vanquished enemy was derived the ceremony of offering blood to a ghost, and to a god. ”

“ When this bleeding is spontaneous it comes from the mucous membranes, especially from the nose, but also from the mouth, bowel and bronchial tubes. Slight bruises are apt to be followed by extravasations of blood into the tissues; the swollen joints (knee especially) of a bleeder are probably due, in the first instance, to the escape of blood into the joint cavity or synovial membrane. It is always from the smallest vessels that the blood escapes, and may do so in such quantities as to cause death in a few hours. ”

“ Consequently, with the exception of wounds inflicted very soon after death, we can distinguish an ante-mortem from a post-mortem wound by the condition in which the blood is clotted. If there is any hemorrhage, the wound being inflicted before the loss of animal heat and the blood remains entirely fluid on the surface or in an ecchymosis, we know that the wound was produced after death and some hours after death unless any of those conditions exist in which the blood does not normally coagulate. ”

“ These conditions increase with the length of time after death, so that after a time a wound made on a cadaver would show very little if any clotting owing to very slight hemorrhage, and little or no clotting of the blood extravasated. When the body has lost its animal heat and rigor mortis has begun to set in, then there is no more coagulation of the blood and no more hemorrhage, under normal conditions, for the blood has mostly become clotted in the vessels of the body. ”

“ Further, a hemorrhage during life is an active and not a [484] passive one; the blood is forced into the interspaces of the tissues in the vicinity of the wound, and is found infiltrated in the cellular tissue, the muscles, the sheaths of the vessels, etc. It is here incorporated, as it were, with the tissues so that it cannot be washed away. In an ante-mortem wound the arterial nature of the hemorrhage may show by the marks of the jets of blood about the wound or on the clothes or surrounding objects. ”

“ Primary hemorrhage.—Primary hemorrhage of a serious nature from gunshot wounds does not often come within the sphere of the surgeon’s observation. If hemorrhage occur from one of the main arteries, it probably proves rapidly fatal; and surgeons, after an action, are usually too much occupied with the urgent necessities of the living wounded to spare time for examining the wounds of the dead, who are mostly buried on the field where they fall. Thus most surgeons speak of primary hemorrhage being exceedingly rare, more rare, perhaps, than it actually is. ”

“ In our experience with game shooting, we never could see the advantage of longitudinal grooves running down the shaft of the arrow, such as some aborigines use, supposed to promote bleeding. In the first place these marks are inadequate in depth, and secondly it is not the exterior bleeding that kills the wounded animal so much as the internal hemorrhage.
A sufficiently wide head on the arrow cuts a hole large enough to permit the escape of excess blood, and, as a matter of fact, nearly all of our shots are perforating, going completely through the body. ”

“ The wide-spread popular superstition of the vampire and of the ghoul, seems to be an outgrowth of this universal belief, that transfused blood is re-vivification. The bloodless shades, leaving their graves at night, seek renewed life, by drawing out the blood of [115] those who sleep; taking of the life of the living, to supply temporary life to the dead. This idea was prevalent in ancient Babylon and Assyria. ”

“ The blood as it spurted from the vein would be collected in a container and measured. When enough blood was removed, the bleeding would [Pg 11] be stopped by a bandage or compress applied to the incision.
Larger Image Figure 5.—18th-19th century lancets and lancet cases. The cases are made of mother-of-pearl, silver, shagreen, and tortoise shell. (NMHT 308730.10. SI photo 76-9116.)
Teaching a medical student how to bleed has had a long tradition. Before approaching a patient, the student practiced opening a vein quickly and accurately on plants, especially the fruits and stems. ”

“ And even where the blood of the slayer is insisted on, there are often found indications that the purpose of this choice rests on the primitive belief that the lost life is [263] made good to the depleted family by the newly received blood. [565] Thus, in the region of Abyssinia, the blood of the slayer is drunk by the relatives of the one first slain; [566] and, in Palestine, when the goel has shed the blood of an unlawful slayer, those who were the losers of blood by that slayer dip their handkerchiefs in his blood, and so obtain their portion of his life. ”

“ Water is sprinkled on the head, and as the creature shakes itself to throw off the drops, an attendant swings round a heavy sword and decapitates it with one blow. The bleeding head is caught up and presented to the pujari, who seizes it eagerly. Placing his lips to the artery he presents all the appearance of drinking the blood. ”

“ There was one major difference between bleeding a man and bleeding a horse or cow, and that was the amount of strength required to open a vein. The considerable force needed to pierce the skin and the tunic of the blood vessel made the operation much more difficult to perform than human phlebotomy. ”

“ There are a few people whose blood lacks some of the necessary chemical substances to enable it to clot; such persons are known technically as “bleeders.” Even a slight injury in one of them will cause serious, or even fatal, hemorrhage, unless the escape of blood is stopped artificially, since it will not stop of itself. ”

“ The blood is dry and brittle, and can often be detached, or a splinter of it, as it were, obtained. The edges of the splinter, if submitted to transmitted light, are observed to be red. Blood upon iron is frequently very intimately adherent; this is specially the case if the stain is upon rusty iron, for hæmatin forms a compound with iron oxide. ”

“ Little impression can be made on an acute disease by the slow removal of even a large quantity of blood, as the organs have time to accommodate themselves to the loss, which might, for any good it will do, as well be dispensed with. Either bleed rapidly or not at all. The nearer the commencement of an ailment, in which you employ bleeding, the operation is resorted to, the greater the chance of its doing good; no time ought, therefore, to be lost in using the lancet, when once it is known to be required. ”

“ Spouting blood, bleeding its huge life away, shivering in great convulsions, means only for us forty barrels more of grease, and a couple of hundred pounds of bone to manufacture death-dealing, rib-compressing, liver-squeezing corsets from. ”

“ But because fresh blood will always congeal with the aid of a little salt or vinegar, people often smear the basin over with these to attain their own ends and deceive others; therefore, always wash out the basin you are going to use or buy a new one from a shop. Thus the trick will be defeated. "The above method of dropping blood on the bones may be used even by a grandchild, desirous of identifying the remains of his grandfather; but husband and wife, not being of the same flesh and blood, it is absurd to suppose that the blood of one would soak into the bones of the other. ”

“ Of 334 cases of bleeding in hemophilia collected by Grandidier, 169 were from the nose, 43 from the mouth, 15 from the stomach, 36 from the bowels, 16 from the urethra, 17 from the lungs, and a few from the skin of the head, eyelids, scrotum, navel, tongue, finger-tips, vulva, and external ear. Osler remarks that Professor Agnew knew of a case of a bleeder who had always bled from cuts and bruises above the neck, never from those below. The joint-affections closely resemble acute rheumatism. Bleeders do not necessarily die of their early bleedings, some living to old age. ”

“ Extravasation of blood in the bone indicates a wound made before death. If doubts exist as to the identity of the remains, a son or grandson of the deceased is required to shed some of his blood upon it. If there is relationship, the blood will penetrate the bone, otherwise it will not. ”