At the word "vampire" many imagine some otherworldly creature that walks around at night in search of human victims - this is the image imposed on us by mass culture. Meanwhile, vampires really exist, and these are the same living people like you and me. They differ from the rest only in that they regularly drink human blood …
Blood for the Pope
Blood-drinking rituals have existed for a long time. Legend has it that at the end of the 15th century, a healer under the then Pope Innocent VIII killed three young men in order to give them the blood of the dying pontiff. Then they believed that through the blood of young people the power of their youth could be transmitted …
Subsequently, blood began to be actively used to treat some diseases, for example, epilepsy. Thus, the sick collected the warm blood of the executed from the scaffolds to use it as medicine.
This practice stopped during the Enlightenment. At the same time, people continued to believe in and fear vampires.
Scalpel Ghoul
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No, modern bloodsuckers don't kill anyone. As a rule, their donors are volunteers from among relatives and friends. BBC Future correspondent interviewed New Orleans resident John Edgar Browning, who agreed to give blood to his friend.
“The beginning of this action resembles a medical procedure: Browning's acquaintance wipes a small area of skin in the upper part of his back with alcohol, then makes an incision with an amateur disposable scalpel and presses to make blood flow,” the journalist says. "And then he falls to the wound with his lips and begins to greedily suck in the dark red liquid."
Vampires - "medical" and others
Browning did not at all seek to become a donor for a vampire - as a researcher at Louisiana State University, he pursued purely research goals. He knew that in New Orleans (as, probably, in other cities of the United States, there is a whole community of "vampires".
Margarita Troitsyna
