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Biomedical subjects

K Pelis

Publications and source records attributed to K Pelis.

5 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1997

Moving blood.

Our internationally acclaimed journalist Sanguinia has returned safely from her historic assignment. Travelling from Homeric Greece to British Romanticism, she was witness to blood drinking, letting, bathing, and transfusion. In this report, she explores connections between the symbolic and the sadistic; the mythic and the medical--all in an effort to appreciate the layered meanings our culture has given to the movement of blood between our bodies.

Animals↗
PubMed1997

Blood clots: the nineteenth-century debate over the substance and means of transfusion in Britain.

Historians have devoted little attention to blood transfusion in the nineteenth century. In part, this neglect reflects the presentist assumption that, before Karl Landsteiner's discovery of blood types, this practice would have failed too often to gain currency. Yet, transfusion was in fact the subject of much debate, and was actively practised, primarily by obstetricians on haemorrhaging women. Examining this practice through the conceptual lens of 'blood clots', both as noun and as observation, I follow transfusors' assumptions about the nature of the blood and the problem of its coagulation. Tracing the medicalization of ideas about blood by the century's end, I map this shift onto changing notions about why transfusion was performed, what substance was best employed, and what instrument best fitted that substance's movement into the circulation. In this way, 'Blood Clots' reconstructs the discourse surrounding transfusion, extending that discourse to material culture in order to illuminate the rationale that guided transfusion's practice in nineteenth-century Britain.

Blood Coagulation↗