Two Russian surgeons and an anesthetist took turns lying on an operating table beside a critically-ill patient, according to the then government newspaper, Izvestia, and saved the patient's life with direct transfusions of their own blood. Fresh blood was needed because the patient's own blood had ceased to coagulate. In such a case, conserved blood, would not be effective. The three women practitioners each gave what they could -- a half pint of blood.

A television show depicts a traveler lost in the Sahara Desert and dying of thirst; he removes his dagger from its sheath, cuts the skin on the shoulder of his camel, sucks the blood, and his thirst is quenched and he is saved!

Blood is life. Loss of blood is death.

It is by the blood of a lamb painted on the door lintel of a Hebrew home…