Charles L. Bardes - Pale Faces: The Masks of Anemia

A BELLEVUE LITERARY PRESS PATHOGRAPHY

PALE FACES

The Masks of Anemia

THE BLP PATHOGRAPHIES SERIES

With Pale Faces: The Masks of Anemia by Charles L. Bardes, Bellevue Literary Press launches its Pathographies series, each volume of which will chart the impact of disease on human individuals and populations from the biological, historical, and cultural perspective.

This series is dedicated to the memory of Lewis Thomas, author of several critically acclaimed books of popular science including The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher and The Fragile Species. His longtime association with the New York University School of Medicine, beginning in the 1950s, influenced and inspired generations of young physicians, some of whom went on to become writers.

First published in the United States in 2008 by

Bellevue Literary Press, New York

FOR INFORMATION ADDRESS:

Bellevue Literary Press

NYU School of Medicine

550 First Avenue

OBV 640

New York, NY 10016

Copyright 2008 by Charles L. Bardes

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

This book was published with the generous support of Bellevue Literary Presss founding donor the Arnold Simon Family Trust, and the Bernard & Irene Schwartz Foundation.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bardes, Charles L., 1956

Pale faces : the masks of anemia / Charles Bardes. 1st ed.

p. ; cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Anemia. 2. AnemiaHistory. 3. AnemiaCross-cultural studies. I. Title. [DNLM: 1. Anemiahistory. 2. Anemiapsychology. 3. Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice. 4. History of Medicine. 5. Medicine in Literature. 6. Mythology. WH 11.l B245p 2008]

RC641.B37 2008 616.152dc22 2008006366

Book design and type formatting by Bernard Schleifer

ISBN 978-1-934137-91-8

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

I have cut up mine

Anatomy, dissected

my self, and they

are gone to read upon

me.

distortions on Donne, Meditation IX
Medicamina Scribunt

This is Natures nest of Boxes; The Heavens containe the Earth, the Earth, Cities, Cities, Man. And all these are Concentrique; the common center to them all, is decay, ruine; only that is Eccentrique, which was never made; only that place, or garment rather, which we can imagine, but not demonstrate, That light, which is the very emanation of the light of God, in which the Saints shall dwell, with which the Saints shall be appareld, only that bends not to this Center, to Ruine; that which was not made of Nothing, is not threatned with this annihilation.

JOHN DONNE, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions,
Meditation X, Lent et Serpenti satagunt occurrere Morbo

pilgrim at plow

Piers Plowman

Contents

MODERN MEDICINE PRESENTS ITSELF AS A FORWARD MARCH of rational, scientific, progressive enlightenment, a triumph of fact. But beneath this bright and cheery tale lie darker layers of myth, alchemy, magic, ritual, oracle, memory, forgetting, fear, and melancholy.

Anemia is not exactly a disease but rather a core medical idea, like fever, that spans the worlds many ages and its many places. How a culture comprehends this deficiency of blood, among the commonest of all human afflictions, bespeaks its concerns, its science, and its mythos.

The complete biography of a disease would unfold both its rationalized knowing (science) and its other-mediated knowing, which takes the form of folkloric, literary, religious, symbolic, and vatic expression. Also its poems, whether lyric, epic, ode, or dithyramb; also its unknowing.

ANEMIA, ANEMIC, NO BLOOD, BLOODLESS, A DEFICIENCY OF blood. My lifes blood is deficient.

Anemia is a doctors number, rendered by a machine. Anemia is a mans pallor, his weakness, his fatigue, his sickness. I feel weak, I feel myself less a man, my manhood slips away, my lifeblood slips away, so this is how it is, living less, someday living not. The number half-records the sensation and half-predicts it, a foretaste of future dying, also a forecast. The physician speaks and listens, the blood count speaks, too, to him.

Anemia is a new idea, born of the instruments and later the machines that measure the properties of a persons blood. Anemia is an old idea, touching all we think and feel of blood, all we have ever thought or felt, here or elsewhere, now or before. Anemia aligns pairs of opposites: strength and weakness, vigor and lassitude, ruddy and pale, hearty and sickly, lively and moribund, robust and sallow, active and passive, virile and effete, sanguine and melancholic. Blood is life, lost blood is lost life, spilt life, anemia.

Blood circulates within the vessels and the heart, within the flesh and the organs, constant motion, life. Blood sits tranquilly under the microscope.

This book is an excursion, riff, or romp through the many cultural, literary, mythological, ritualistic, historical, and to some degree biological aspects of the medical condition anemia. To avoid cluttering the pages with footnotes, the references occur in endnotes that are an integral part of the text itself. These mean to add to the readers pleasure, not to spin about academics. I invite readers who like this sort of thing to look at them from time to time.

Is anemia the sickly feeling a patient experiences, or the cells seen by a microscopist, or the number a machine prints out, the doctor interpreting the number, the patient hearing his number related, the construction of anemia, its history, its story, its understory, its fictive representations, its memory, its linkages, its metaphors, its allegories, its ceremonies, its concrete indication of disease or death? Its alieniloquium, its other-speak? Would a complete account not include all these things? If you prick us, do we not bleed?