Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from HouseofWorks.com

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm De Blaine and Chuck

Robordey and we have another very special October Halloween spooky episode for

you today. This time it is an interview in fact. Yes we did something really cool

recently. Last month we went to the Decatur Book Festival right here in Georgia

and we got the chance to see Holly Tucker who is an associate professor at Vanderbilt

University talk about her new book which is called Bloodwork, a tale of medicine

and murder and a scientific revolution. So we went into it excited about it but

thinking okay this is gonna be a book all about the history of blood and blood

circulation and blood transfusions but what we found was so so much more. Well

yeah and because Holly's interview was part of the Atlanta Science Taverns

first science track at the Decatur Book Festival I had a suspicion that there

would be more than just sort of a straight medical story. And I mean it

there is a lot more. There are monsters, there is murder obviously in the title

and the thing that surprised me most about the book and about Holly's lecture

though is that the history of blood transfusion starts so much earlier than you

would expect. I guess that's the first maybe a little disturbing fact about the

book. I mean it starts off in the 1600s. Yeah just to give you a brief rundown

it's about the very first blood human blood transfusion which took place in

the 1600s and the man who performed them and how his experiments were kind of

shut down and the mystery, the murder mystery surrounding them. In this rivalry

too there are a lot of rivalries that play between France where the first

...