Get to work! New popular science books: Blood is one of the most expensive liquids

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Recently I cut myself with a kitchen knife – just sharply on my thumb, not deep, but it started bleeding. I reflexively pressed the wound with my other hand. “If there is blood, you can always press on it,” writes Reinhard Friedl. And the German doctor should know, because he has already operated on thousands of hearts. “Strictly speaking, cardiac surgeons are blood surgeons,” Friedl says. Although he cannot stitch blood together, he can ensure that it receives the correct impulses and flows through the correct channels.

“Blood, River of Life” is the title of his recently published 300-page work, which has already been included in the “long list of the best science books of 2024.” But don’t worry, the doctor does not write in technical jargon, but in a very clear way. He shares visual examples from his sewing box and goes beyond that. “Water is the lifeblood of the earth, and the blood has the saltiness of the oceans,” Friedl says. “Our body is 70 percent water, and 70 percent of it covers the earth.”

Each person is a small world: “Blood is an organ that flows silently and smoothly in all other organs, filling them, giving them life and connecting them.” This makes blood a sought-after commodity, with an annual value of $126 billion, making it the 14th largest traded commodity in the world. And at $400 per liter, it is the tenth most expensive liquid – after scorpion venom for arthritis (number one), Chanel perfume No. 1. 5 (sixth place) and black printer ink (8th place).

The English physician William Harvey (1578–1657) discovered that blood flows in a circle and returns to where it started, namely to the heart. However, his discovery made him few friends. Many doctors continued to believe in the theory of the Greek physician Galen of Pergamon (129–216) that the heart was a flame that burned fuel in the form of food and blood; The resulting smoke is exhaled through the lungs.

Today we can laugh at this, but the idea of ​​the pump is also questioned: “Is the heart the mill wheel in the human body that drives the bloodstream, or is it also the case in humans that the river drives the mill?” ? – asks Friedl. And he points out that a wealth of scientific evidence suggests that “in the beginning there was a river.” And also at the end, because many cardiac surgeons are familiar with the phenomenon that the heart does not empty with the last beat, but, on the contrary, becomes more and more filled with blood.

“Now you rightly ask: why do we need a rhythmically beating heart if our blood can flow on its own?” According to recent evidence, the heart rhythmically interrupts existing blood flow and converts it into pressure signals. “The pressure that the heart creates in the arteries does not serve to transport blood, but rather to counteract gravity,” Friedl writes.

Source: Blick