The Insatiate Countess sounds an alarm against the allure of the lusty widow exploited by early modern English comedy. On the stage, the nubile widow provided the audience’s younger sons and poor unmarried men with the opportunity to fantasize about the windfall of socioeconomic privilege normally reserved for those blessed with primogeniture. Marston’s tragedy strips bare this fantasy of securing a legacy that will leave an impression on social memory. It does so by dramatizing the detrimental effects the widow’s extraordinary concupiscence has on two primary memory arts for perpetuating male identity: commemoration (the remembrance of the dead husband) and nosce te ipsum (the remembrance of the male self). For all its dire warnings, the plot’s finale, however, cannot resolve the troubling contradiction of the countess’s lustful body: the “insatiate” widow induces men to forget themselves and simultaneously and inescapably constitutes the vehicle through which patriarchal memorialization depends for its continuity.

This chapter explores Galen’s ideas concerning the digestive-nutritive process. It focuses on his explanation of the motion of nutritive matter from its ingestion as food through its alteration into blood until its complete assimilation to the different body parts. The discussion follows its path inside the body from the mouth to the individual parts and describes the changes it undergoes in its different anatomical ‘stations’ and by what means it moves through these ‘stations’. In so doing it brings to light a fundamental but generally overlooked part of the digestive-nutritive process in Galen, namely physical motions of the parts such as the oesophagus, stomach and intestines. The chapter shows how these motions of contraction and extension actively and ‘mechanically’ move the nutritive matter into and through the body by pulling, pushing and compressing the parts of the body and the matter they hold inside them.

An excess or deficit of specific neurotransmitters or receptors has been the dominant theme for explaining the pathology of major mental illness for many decades. The best known example is that hyperdopaminergia is the cause of psychosis. Similar proposals have been made for glutamate and the endocannabinoids, based on the ability of drugs acting on these systems to elicit psychotic mental states. In addition, cannabis is also a risk factor for the development of schizophrenia. On this background, researchers have measured several endocannabinoid components in people with psychotic illness compared to controls. These components include synthesizing and degrading enzymes for anandamide and 2-arochodonylglycerol, the amount of endocannabinoid transmitter in the bloodstream or CSF and the availability of cannabinoid receptors. There is inconsistency in the field as a whole, but a number of intriguing findings have emerged, particularly reports of increased anandamide level in psychosis. In this chapter, the major studies are reviewed and collated.

Intravenous fluids are solutions containing various quantities of water, electrolytes, salts, and sugar. They are used to maintain haemostasis when the enteral route is insufficient to meet physiological demand. Fluid therapy maintains hydration, oxygen delivery, and thus organ function. Poor perioperative fluid control is associated with impaired physiological function, resulting in patient harm and increasing healthcare costs. Perioperative fluid management is based upon three distinct but related factors: patient (age and comorbidities), surgical (urgency, indication and duration) and anaesthetic. This chapter is an introduction to intravenous fluids, highlighting the physiological control mechanisms, the composition of intravenous fluids, and important clinical assessment principles.

Critical ill patients are often haemodynamically unstable and accurate continuous monitoring is vital. Haemodynamic monitoring describes the measurement of the cardiovascular stability of the patient. Invasive blood pressure monitoring and central venous pressure monitoring provide a ‘real time’ measurement of the patients haemodynamic status and better allows clinicians to pre-emptively treat a patient before a more serious problem arises. Although invasive blood pressure monitoring has several advantages compared to non-invasive blood pressure monitoring, it is not without risk. Central venous pressure monitoring is similarly beneficial in that it supports the clinical decision making regarding a patient’s fluid status but also comes with additional risks. This chapter explores invasive blood pressure and central venous pressure monitoring in detail.

This chapter argues that American horror is defined both by its “paraliterary” status and by its representations of the bloodied body in pain. Unlike the more culturally prestigious category of the Gothic, which typically dwells on the crisis of the rational mind, horror has tended to appear in culturally maligned or ephemeral forms and focus on corporeal pain, violence, and distress. Horror's focus on the body, it is further suggested, stems from the modern American state's withholding of freedoms according to embodied characteristics: race, gender, sexuality, ability, and so on. The historical appearance of horror narratives often correlates to crisis and tensions surrounding the expansion of the civil and political rights that centrist liberalism promised, so that when previously excluded or marginalized groups begin to demand inclusion and recognition of their past disempowerment, horror becomes a medium especially electric with these concerns.

William Harvey’s demonstration of the circulation of the blood is one of the Scientific Revolution’s most influential and lasting achievements. But in spite of Harvey’s innovation, and paradoxically given the extent to which he came to be represented as a founder of modern science, he tied himself to ancient authorities and sought to insulate natural philosophy and the art of medicine from the new mechanical-corpuscular and chemical philosophies of the period. The reception of Harvey’s work, both in physiology and later in embryology, shows that Harvey’s research program won numerous early converts, who used his program for their own ends, including support for the new philosophies, in the cases of René Descartes and Robert Boyle. Untethered from his preferred Scholastic framework, Harvey’s conceptual foundations, techniques, and conclusions led to new discoveries, and unresolved questions in Harvey’s account about the movement of the heart, nature of the blood, and respiration would motivate intense inquiry. The circulation of the blood and later physiology therefore provide an essential perspective for the examination of early modern disputes about experimentation and its limits, the rhetoric of novelty, the unity of nature, and the very notion of life.

The chapter focuses on the role of the heart and the image of the world as a cardiovascular system in the post-Chrysippean tradition. Within this picture, then, it will be shown that in later Stoicism, not only the heart but the blood first and foremost was used in explaining the essence and features of the soul and eventually employed as a model to explain the universe. The existence of a ‘hematic’ variation within cardiocentrism will thus be highlighted, which allows some Stoics to better justify the spreading and the action of the soul within the body, and that of god throughout the cosmos. By doing so, the post-Chrysippean tradition recalls Empedocles’ position. This topic will be first of all studied in Diogenes of Babylon, who stresses the importance of the heart in the wake of his master Chrysippus, yet apparently providing a different definition of the soul as (made of) blood. The chapter examines then Posidonius, whose cardiocentrism – though not strictly ‘hematic’ – differs from that of both Aristotle and Chrysippus and is crucial for his understanding of living beings and natural phenomena. Lastly, the contribution considers Seneca and Manilius, who often represent the universe as a cardiovascular system enlivened by a network of blood vessels.

Keith Michael Green’s “Disabling Freedom: Bloody Shirt Rhetoric in Postbellum Slave Narratives” explores the mystifications and erasures of anti-Black violence that characterized Reconstruction-era writing. Green pays deep attention to how select narratives – especially the much-neglected Story of Mattie Jackson and Keckley’s better-known Behind the Scenes – strategically employed oblique narrativizations of Black pain and personhood to avoid pernicious narratives of Black unfitness and hyper-embodiment. Green draws on what he calls the “poetics of the bloody shirt” to study the ventriloquization of injury through surrogate objects and persons, with emphasis on not only Jackson and Keckley’s texts but also works by Sojourner Truth, Still, and William Wells Brown to underscore how indirect representations of injury helped postbellum slave narratives articulate the contradictions and risks of Black life and to revise ableist visions of freedom – in the process, contesting the erasure of Black pain in post-emancipation discourse.

Blood is a concentrated suspension of deformable, aggregating, red blood cells within a medium of other cells and proteins. It is a complex colloidal system with a non-Newtonian rheology that is characterized by viscoplasticity, thixotropy, and viscoelasticity. After reviewing some of the key biological characteristics of human blood, and after presenting a short historical review of the subject, we present some recent accomplishments. These range from the development of a parameterized Casson model, based on the hematocrit and fibrinogen levels, to the discussion of several recent structural models that are able to capture several of the time-dependent rheological effects of blood. A comparison is also offered between model predictions and the results of recent transient measurements, some involving a newly proposed variant of LAOS: the Unidirectional LAOS. The latter experiment is especially appropriate for the study of blood rheology as it follows roughly the flow experienced by blood in the arterial circulation. It consists of a superposition of steady and large amplitude oscillatory flow in such a way that flow reversal is avoided. Some additional models are discussed along with the challenges and opportunities for future research.

The chapter unites anthropological accounts of blood. It introduces refrains that unify themes of the entire book. It argues that blood marks the bounds of religious and social bodies, using Durkheim, Douglas, and Bildhauer; Irenaeus, Maximus, and Aquinas. Iron compounds make blood red, but societies draft its color and stickiness for their own purposes. Inside, blood carries life. Outside, blood marks the body fertile or at risk. But that’s a social fiction. Skin makes a membrane to pass when a body breathes, eats, perspires, eliminates, menstruates, ejaculates, conceives, or bleeds. Only blood evokes so swift and social a response: It brings parent to child, bystander to victim, ambulance to patient, soldier to comrade, midwife to mother, defender to border. The New Testament names the blood of Christ three times as often as his cross – five times as often as his death. The blood of Jesus is the blood of Christ; the wine of communion is the blood of Christ; the means of atonement is the blood of Christ; the kinship of believers is the blood of Christ; the cup of salvation is the blood of Christ; icons ooze with the blood of Christ; and the blood of Christ is the blood of God.

“Jesus and the Gender of Blood.” Here’s a place blood seeps in where it hardly seems to belong: Crucifixion kills not by blood loss but suffocation. Neither crucifixion nor a common meal requires blood. Hands and feet can be lashed without nails. Why must Jesus bleed? Gospel writers portray Jesus at the Last Supper as mobilizing the language of blood to transform a structure of violent oppression – crucifixion – into a peaceful feast. The image of the Woman with a Flow of Blood, read as dysmenorrhea, recognizes a kinship: three gospels identify both the woman and Jesus with their bleeding, as leaky. The stories feminize Jesus by turning his blood away from male-gendered violence and toward female-gendered purposes of new life and rebirth. Reflections on the Eucharist and taboo.

In modern creationism, blood-language (even more than a high view of scripture) determines whether evolution can be true. In One Blood, leading creationist Ken Ham finds evolution too bloody for a good God. A good God could hardly use predation, extinction, and death as a means. For Ham, blood sets humans at one with or apart from the “dumb beasts.” But Ham drafts too narrow an atonement, where the blood of Christ makes up only for sin. Blood must also mean solidarity. Uses Irenaeus, William Jennings Bryan, Marilyn Adams, Teilhard de Chardin, Sergei Bulgakov.

“Blood after Isaac” reads the binding of Isaac, where some interpreters see blood, although the story never mentions it. This chapter introduces the pattern that blood seeps in where it seems not to belong. The little word "na," untranslated in English versions of the story, in modern Hebrew means simply "please," but in the Hebrew Bible indicates irony, as in "say, go ahead, see if I care." The chapter argues that the story of Isaac is best understood in terms of divine irony, God imitating Abraham as a trickster. Why does Abraham not catch on?

In Reconquista Spain, a barely united state turned its anxieties inward with anti-Semitic laws on blood purity among converts from Judaism and Islam. The same insecure state turned outward to conquer Mexico, where Franciscans spent fifty years recording Aztec human sacrifice in codices and color drawings. Castilians and Aztecs alike marked their external bounds and internal bonds with blood. Ethnicizing ideas of blood purity crossed the Atlantic to ruddy Christian perceptions of Mesoamerican sacrifice. Two blood-obsessed cultures met to reveal disturbing resonances in Christian blood language. Uses Sircoff on limpieza de sangre and Timothy Radcliffe on cultic irony in Hebrews.

Maximus the Confessor's theory of the logoi in the Logos applied to human evolution. God's use of material things – such as stones – to bring about the incarnation. Maximus's pregnant mentions of the blood of Christ as the intelligibility of things.

For and against nutritive theories of the Eucharist – theories based on digesting versus eating. Why God became simian. The primatology of the incarnation. Aquinas's Commentary on John.

In 2007 the bishops of the US Episcopal Church invited my advice on a “theology of same-sex relationships.” Of what other panelists said – PhDs teaching at respected institutions – the most arresting was: “The trouble with same-sex relationships is they impugn the blood of Christ.” They do what? The original remark attempted a hazing; the final result bestowed a gift, the gift of blood made strange. Blood is supposed to wash gay people with the atonement, even as self-accepting gay people say they don’t need cleansing. It’s supposed to unite Christians in communion, even as sexuality debates divide the churches. It’s supposed to protect the succession of priests, even as bishops shield them for sexual crimes. To some Christians, such failures of Christ’s blood amount to a cosmological disturbance. But what if Jesus becomes a bridegroom of blood, who stays on the cross for love of the (male) thief to whom he promises a life together in paradise? Reflects on Anselm, Abelard, Sebastian Moore, and "pleading the blood."

“Blood after Leviticus” observes there is initially not “enough” blood in Leviticus, which only “daubs” or “sprinkles” it, with the rest poured on the ground, removed from cultic use. The reinterpretation of Leviticus in the New Testament book of Hebrews imagines much more. Leviticus’ reception history shows how drops of blood become floods in imagination: Blood burgeons at need. The chapter includes accounts of Christian animal sacrifice at sites of St. George in the West Bank and Samaritan animal sacrifice at passover. It reflects on tropes of infinite blood.