Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood Read Online Free PDF

his blood altogether. For the past ten years Steve has used a lab called Immunodiagnostic Laboratories, located in a downtown medical building. The door to IDL looks like a private eye’s office in a film noir: hand-painted black lettering on thick mottled glass, a dark oak frame, a well-worn mail slot. Unless you had business within, you’d be hard-pressed to guess what’s behind it. The tiny waiting room inside is narrow and dim, an overheated den dominated by old magazines.
     
    Same magazines, different location: the old-fashioned barbershop, alive and well today in small-town America, with its trademark candy-cane pole out front. This, like IDL, is a descendant of medieval bloodletting establishments. Back in thirteenth-century Europe, venesection was the specialty of the “Surgeons of the Short Robe,” who were also called barbers. (“Surgeons of the Long Robe” performed more elaborate operations.) Barbers also cut hair, stitched minor wounds, gave enemas, and extracted teeth. At this stage of worldly enlightenment, it was considered healthy for an individual to be bled a couple times a year just to remove the buildup of toxic humors. Think of it as opening the window of a stuffy room. To advertise his services, the barber posted a striped pole outside his door. When I was a boy, this pole was a reminder of the candy I’d earn if I didn’t fidget. The truth is far more ghoulish. The red stripe symbolized blood; the white stripe, the bandages; the blue stripe, the vein; and the pole itself represented the stick the patient gripped to facilitate blood flow. Barbers continued to perform venesection up through the seventeenth century, and early colonists transported the practice to America.
    Although Steve never makes an appointment for a blood draw, he almost never has a wait at IDL. He needs to fast for certain tests, so we’re there first thing in the morning. Seriously groggy, Steve is like a big sedated dog that’s followed me into the waiting area. The receptionist’s window slides back, a courteous hello rings out, and Steve hands over his lab write-up. Usually, once he’s called inside, I sit down and use the time to catch up on ancient celebrity gossip. Today, with the permission of lab manager Rosemary Cozzo, I’ll be a fly on the sterile office wall.
    IDL’s inner offices are as bright as a new refrigerator and divided into cool, white compartments. Steve, a foot taller than Rosemary, squeezes into one of the draw-station chairs as she studies the lab form. There’s not much room for spectating. I could easily get in her way. Fortunately she is someone over whose shoulder I can actually look, my five-eight to her five-one. As if someone has just said
Go,
she starts plucking empty vials, three purples, two yellows, and assembles the other equipment she’ll need.
    Rosemary, who’s in her late fifties, could illustrate the dictionary definition for
nurse
(see also,
efficiency
). In her starched white, monogrammed lab coat, skirt, and low pumps, the only thing she’s missing is an old-fashioned nurse’s cap bobby-pinned to her no-fuss hair. She has a heart-shaped face and a warm smile. As she snaps on latex gloves, my eyes are drawn to a prominent vein on her left temple, a blue squiggle under her ivory skin. If Galen were here, I can’t help thinking, he would want to bleed from it. He devoted tremendous attention to mapping the body’s veins as sites for letting, everywhere from behind the ears to the roof of the mouth to the ankle. These days, by comparison, blood is almost always drawn from a vein in the crook of an elbow. If one is difficult to access—say, if a patient is obese—a vein on the leg might be used. There’s no such problem with Steve, who has lean, muscular arms and the big, ropy veins of a gladiator. Rosemary looks pleased, as does Steve, though for a different reason. Some days a newly trained staff person draws his blood, and that rarely goes well. Even before the needle