Thanks for down learning the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk.

I hope you enjoy the program.

Hello, for more than 1500 years, popular imagination, Western science and the Christian

church colluded in a belief that blood was the link between the human and the divine.

The Greek physician Galen declared that it was blood that contained the force of life

and linked the body to the soul. The Christian church established the Eucharist, the taking of the body and

blood of Christ. In our blood was our individuality it was thought, our essence,

and our blood lines were special. Transfusion threatened all that and now itself is being

questioned. Why is it that blood was used to define both man

and Messiah and how has the tradition of blood in religious thought been affected by

the progress of medicine? With me to discuss the oxygen barrier that courses through our culture,

are Anne Hardy, reader in the history of medicine at the Welcome Trust

Center at University College London.

Jonathan Sorday, Professor of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde, and Mira Rubin, Professor of European History at Queen Mary University of London.

Mir Rubin, before we come to the early Christian Church, can you tell us what the religious attitudes towards

blood were within Judaism?

Judaism has a total horror of the use, the mundane use of blood.

In blood courses the spirit, the life power which is God-given,

and it's an economy into which humans should not really at all intervene.

But there is some use of

blood in very particular ritual context that is by the priest at the temple

as they sacrifice animals they can sprinkle blood they can sacrifice animals, they can sprinkle blood, they can dob various ritual

...