The Intermountain Catholic. (Salt Lake City [Utah] ;) 1899-1920, 1909-09-25
THE BLOOD is THE LIFE.

In late issue Of American Medicine New
York August editorial writer contends that in
sanity is not disease of the BRAIN He claims that
the blood is the primary cause of INSANITY and adj
vances some very strong arguments in support of
his hypothesis. "A few years ago." he writes mo
physician dreamt of blood pressure it means little
or nothing to the average doctors Today the physi-
clan who does not possess blood pressure appara-
tus and regulate his treatment more or less by its
findings, is the exception The germs of insanity
and OF many other diseases are in the blood"
Not only did the Mosaic law forbid the drinking
or eating of blood but the prohibition seems to be
one of the earliest injunctions given to renovated
man. In Genesis the ninth chapter, we read: "The
life, that is the blood thereof, shall you not eat"
This prohibition renewed in most positive terms
in Leviticus, and remarkably so in the twelfth and
fifteenth verses of the seventeenth chapter. where
the visiting stranger is included in the Chou shalt
not under the most rigorous penalty.
The doctor who writes for American Medicine is
telling nothing new; that the blood of man or an
imal carried the microbes of disease was known to
Moses as early as two thousand four hundred wears
before the Christian era is an admitted fact Blood
was forbidden to the Hebrews either alone or mixed
with flesh, that is of animals sufocated or killed
without dischargng the blood from them; because
the hfe-and diseases common to life-is in the
blood. Oev. xviii The eating of raw flesh and the
drinking OF blood was common custom when Moses
led the hosts into the desert. We have an example
IN the life of Saul which shows the natural inclna-
ton of the Israeltes to this practice notwithstand
ing the divince prohibition Saul's soldiers, after
battle, fell voraciously upon the cattle they had
taken, killed them and ate the raw flesh and blood
"and the soldiers ate them with the blood"-for
which Saul in anger rebuked them
There is a terrible and fearfully suggestive PAS
sage in the Book of Wisdom revealing the frightful
degradation of the accused Cananites "Those
merciless murderers of their own children. eaters
of mems bowels and devourers of blood" It reads:
80 Lord, our God thou didst hold in horror the
ancient inhabitants of thy holy land, because they
drank without pity the blood of their children whom
they sacrificed to Moloch" The Israelites even ac-
CURED this unnatural lust for blood and the prophet
Ezechial charged them before God with the detest-
able practice calling them eaters of human bloodn
Homer, the Oldest and perhaps the greatest of the
poets of ancient times tells us that even the ghosts
Of the dead thirsted for human blood In his
Odyssey he records that when Ulysses wished to
consult the ghost of the soothsayer Tiresias. he |
ended his evocation by pouring into ditch the
blood of one sacrificed for the occasion for writes
The poet blood is the nourishment of the spirits of
he dead"
But why is it that the smoke of blood-partic-
llarly human blood-has tendency to dethrone rea-
on for time and to bring the nature of man under
he dominion of brute passion! Plny, the Roman
and he is corroborated by Lactantius one
Il the early Christian writer's, records that as a
art of the horrd performances in the great circus
the warm blood of the gladiators (men who fought
nth swords) was handed round the amphitheatre
nd drunk by the spectators" to whet their eniov-
lent of the slaughter. St. Augustine has left us
striking description of the partial insanity or
emonism, which mastered the minds and souls of
he spectators at these public games when they were
ltoxcated by the blood of the gladiators shed in
lie arena.
The fumes of human blood, he assures us, trans
'rmed into savages, into monsters even the most
telligent and worthy spectators Old cavalrymen.
no took part in some desperate charges, have told
) that the smoke of hot blood, mingling with the
r they breathed, set their brains on fire and they
ecame as wild beasts. The spectator at a modern