The Book of Blood Summary

The book that I choose to read for science was called the book of blood by H P new quest. The book, as its title may tell, is about blood, it's functions, previous conceptions and misconceptions about blood, and the myths associated with blood. From reading this book, I learned a lot of things that I didn't know about before concerning blood, like the fact that the human circulatory system can stretch around the world about two and a half times. Or the fact that blood letting was a pretty common practice in the days before blood and its functions were actually well known. Actually, the book talks a lot about blood letting, and how people used to think that it was a solution for everything, until it killed George Washington. President Washington caught an extremely bad cold, and some doctors tried to practice bloodletting on him, and it eventually killed him. After that, people did not trust the practice of bloodletting and they used other practices to cure their ailments. Aside from the pure factual elements of the book, H P Newquest also explores the myths associated with blood. For example, during the Black Death of the Middle Ages, when basically one-third of Europe died from the bubonic plague. The plague was so contagious that there were mass graves dug because no one could keep up with the burying of the bodies. 

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 Bodies were just thrown into the graves; they were opened and reopened. And when a grave digger would come back to add a new body to the pile, the bandages that the cadaver would be wrapped in would be covered in blood at the mouth because of the swelling of  the bodies, and the grave diggers would think that the bodies were actually vampires that rose out of their graves to drink blood at night. The book describes how this might be the origination of myths about vampires came to be.  The Book of Blood also describes animals that drink blood, and animals, like horseshoe crabs, which have blood that is useful to us. It was a very good book, which was both informative and fun at the same time. I would give this book 5 stars if I had to!