Mar Gómez: "Bleeding was today's paracetamol"

Blood never stops flowing. It's a continuous circuit, vital for sustaining life. This is what Mar Gómez (Madrid, 1977) began to think when she suffered from persistent bleeding, the source of which was unclear. And from these thoughts, her work was born. Blood. An intimate and cultural history of a constant flow (Ariel), a journey through the lens of blood in medicine, literature, religion, and identity.

Interesting, what you say about Aristotle's book, about blood and semen.

— I must confess that I detest Aristotle. Although we obviously owe him many things, the world wouldn't have evolved the same way without his theories. But of course, like any good misogynist, he thought genealogy was solely a part of man. That is, he believed that man was capable of converting blood into semen, and since woman couldn't, she had menstruation. In fact, for him, semen was fertilization. And the woman did nothing; the seed was simply placed inside her.

You link it to religion.

— From that conception comes the idea of genealogy, which later has much to do with the Jewish religion and which has been transmitted throughout the monotheistic religions.

Because?

— The Jewish religion is based on a genealogical saga. God's covenant with Abraham, promising him many children, his own land, and that the Messiah would come from his lineage. This speaks to bloodlines and creates divisions, because there is a chosen people and so on. With Jesus' sacrifice on the cross, Christianity is supposed to be different, and everyone should be able to participate in that religion. However, in 15th-century Spain, statutes of purity of blood were established.

Let's explain it to them.

— It was a time of many conversions, because many Jews had entered Spain and there were also quite a few Muslims. If they converted, they could access places that had previously been only for Christians. And that's why these statutes were created: they served to prove that you had been a Christian for generations, so religion also became a matter of blood.

And how was that proven?

— It's a good question, because where there's a will, there's a way. You had to go looking for baptismal certificates, etc., but these were also falsified. In fact, there's a famous saint, Teresa of Ávila, who came from a family of converts. And this wasn't known until the 1970s. The idea of that different bloodline has remained in the collective imagination.

White supremacists, for example.

— The Nazis also invested money in trying to prove that Aryan blood was different. And despite the fact that no difference has ever been discovered, white supremacy prohibits mixing and intermarriage.

Did the nobles really think their blood was blue?

— There are two theories. The classic defense is that, by not working, their veins were more visible. And another, which I prefer, speaks of a translation error. Tacitus wrote something like "the celestial blood" referring to the divinity of Augustus. And sky blue It was translated as blueAnd from there, the blue blood of the nobility.

There is something about the nobility that I find somewhat repugnant: bloodletting.

— It was today's paracetamol, huh?

How did it work?

— We must remember that the Greeks believed everything was created for a purpose. They couldn't imagine that we had a system of pipes inside us with blood circulating through it. And doctors believed that blood was one of the four humors: there was yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood. But the important thing was blood. And they believed that illness was an imbalance of the four humors, and that there was too much blood. So, what to do?

Bleed.

— And thus balance the body. George Washington, for example, the first president of the United States, did it often and required the entire team to practice it. And he died because they treated an infection by bloodletting him.

You tell the story of the bloodthirsty countess.

— She took blood baths in search of the elixir of youth. The story is terrifying. She was a Hungarian noblewoman who treated her servants very badly. So badly, in fact, that one day she beat a young woman until she bled. A drop of blood fell on her skin, and she believed it had rejuvenated her. And so she began the blood baths.

In other words, to kill.

— Yes, and killing servants wasn't considered a crime, but at some point she said she needed better quality blood and started summoning daughters of the lower nobility. That's when they began investigating her, and it was concluded that she killed around 600 young women. She's one of the most prolific serial killers in history.

But the idea of blood as the elixir of youth remains.

— It's incredible. Right now we have Brian Johnson, a Silicon Valley billionaire who donated all his teenage plasma, even his son's, to the father. And he claims the father improved, but nothing is scientifically proven. Imagine what would happen if it were discovered that young plasma helps with rejuvenation.

The rich would pay and the poor would sell.

— That's why paid blood donations are a problematic issue. The important thing is that, for now, artificial blood has not been manufactured.

We have become accustomed to transfusions as something simple and old-fashioned.

— The first blood transfusion was performed in 1492 on Pope Innocent VIII and was a complete disaster. He died. And when they started performing blood transfusions from person to person, blood types were unknown, so it was pure chance. Blood types weren't identified until the 20th century.

And the war served to advance.

— The current system of blood bank organization is thanks to Dr. Frederic Duran i Jordà and the work he did organizing everything during the Spanish Civil War, especially in Catalonia. He established mobile units, refrigerated trucks… in short, he created the method for preserving blood and performing transfusions.

He also used it for World War II.

— An English doctor, who had taken notice of this system, helped him recover after the war, took him to England, and he assisted there with the blood transfusion system during World War II. There are many beautiful stories of doctors connected to blood.

Who are you thinking about?

— The Argentine physician Luis Agote was the first to discover that blood containing a certain amount of sodium nitrate did not clot. And that's why we can store it today. He decided not to patent it because he wanted his discovery to save as many lives as possible.

Why the blood?

— I had a hemorrhage that wouldn't stop, and the doctors couldn't find the cause. It coincided with my father's scheduled heart surgery, and I began to wonder about blood. I had recently read a book about breasts, but from different perspectives: the medical side, but also literature, art, history… and I thought there wasn't a book like that about blood. So I set out to write it.