Essence and emblem of life--feared, revered, mythologized, and
used in magic and medicine from earliest times--human blood is
now the center of a huge, secretive, and often dangerous
worldwide commerce. It is a commerce whose impact upon humanity
rivals that of any other business--millions of lives have been
saved by blood and its various derivatives, and tens of
thousands of lives have been lost. Douglas Starr tells how this
came to be, in a sweeping history that ranges through the
centuries. With the dawn of science, blood came to be seen as a
component of human anatomy, capable of being isolated, studied,
used. Starr describes the first documented transfusion: In the
seventeenth century, one of Louis XIV's court physicians
transfers the blood of a calf into a madman to "cure" him. At
the turn of the twentieth century a young researcher in Vienna
identifies the basic blood groups, taking the first step toward
successful transfusion. Then a New York doctor finds a way to
stop blood from clotting, thereby mak