HEART FASTENED TO A DYING ANIMAL
Jules Adler’s Transfusion of a Goat's Blood pictured a transfusion in 1890. Dark hair framed the dying maiden’s face against the pillow. A goat was stretched out on an ordinary bench. A history of cohabitation speaks for a far closer connection between animals and humans than the simple rubber tubing in Adler’s painting. This history is celebrated in poetry too, which examines the interface of their health and common fate—the never-ending calamity of death. W.B. Yeats, pondering his own declining health and aging body, was able to see beyond the literal cannula of transfusion. In “Sailing to Byzantium,” he conjured the immense damage to the body from illness and physiologic decline. The spirit, which he posed as the way to remain vital in the face of decline, also fuels medical efforts to improve health and prolong life—literally through transfusion and solid tissue transplants and metaphorically when the perennially young human heart finds itself “fastened to a dying animal,” the body.
Full text available at:
dx.doi.org/10.3201/eid1808.AC1808
Comments and faves