The Death Cruise

Cruiseship

You’re a doctor who watched the Schiavo case with interest, wondering how you too can legally starve your patients to death? Well, now you can study up on how to commit murder without forfeiting your freedom while soaking up sun in the Bahamas. As a bonus, you can also earn continuing education credit — and, for all I know, perhaps write off the cruise on your taxes.

"The assisted suicide advocate [George Felos] who was Michael Schiavo’s lead attorney during the legal battles with Terri Schiavo’s parents will be heading up a ‘euthanasia cruise’ during the first week of January. Doctors and attorneys who participate in the Caribbean cruise can earn continuing education credits by learning more about the medical and legal tactics that can be employed to end patients’ lives.

"Felos will be one of two faculty members leading a program called the ‘Advance Directives/End-of-Life Care and Neurology.’ Those participating in the five-day cruise will leave January 3 for the Bahamas, according to a North County Gazette report [sic, it’s North Country].

"James Barnhill, a physician and longtime partner with Felos in advocating euthanasia, will assist in leading the courses.

"In 1998, Barnhill saw Terri for 10 minutes and told Circuit Court Judge George Greer that he believed she had no chance of recovery. That claim was later refuted by other doctors and experts on caring for incapacitated patients but Greer allowed Michael to take Terri’s life anyway."

GET THE STORY.

It’s stuff like this that make me wonder if hell is going to be a sail on a lake of fire with happy, smiling people plotting to create hell on earth–Michelle.

Communion, Divorce, & C & E Catholics

A reader writes:

I’ve listened to you numerous times on the radio and have a feeling you’re a good person to ask the following question:

My husband and I have been married for many years, raised practicing Catholic children, and are in the process of having our marriage convalidated in the Church.  He is learning and studying the catechism and is interested in converting at some point (raised Mormon).  After Midnight Mass, he asked me why I am not considered worthy to receive the Eucharist at this point but so many people who attend Mass once or twice a year (the C & E’s!) are able to receive.  I have to admit that this bothers me a great deal.  It is painful to sit and watch so many people, including those who are non-Catholic, standing in line to receive the Eucharist.  How can I explain this?  Thanks for your help.

This is a very sensitive question, but I’ll try to answer it as best I can.

The basic answer is that neither persons in your situation (if I understand it correctly) nor the C & Es should be receiving Communion. The difference is that the C & Es don’t seem to know better, whereas you do. This makes your experience more painful than theirs, but it also means that you are better in conformity with God’s will in an important respect, which should be a source of comfort.

Having given the basic answer, I’ll try to flesh it out.

Here’s where it gets really sensitive.

I assume from what you have said that you are a Catholic who, years ago, got married outside the Church without a dispensation from observing the Catholic form of marriage. (If this is not your situation then the following answer does not apply.)

This means that a valid marriage was prevented from coming into existence at that point. Until you have your marriage convalidated, therefore, you are not objectively married and to have marital relations with someone to whom you are not married is objectively and gravely sinful.

It is the presence of this objectively grave sin that prevents you from being able to receive Communion. The situation may be solved either by not having such relations or by having the union convalidated so that there will be an objectively real marriage and the relations will no longer be sinful. If either of these things happens then it will be possible to go to confession and begin receiving Communion.

(NOTE: The fact that a valid marriage did not come into existence when you first attempted it does NOT mean that your children are illegitimate. Assuming that EITHER you OR your husband entered the marriage believing it to be a real marriage then the children will be legitimate.)

The reason that C & E only Catholics should not be receiving Communion is that they are gravely bound to attend Mass each Sunday and holy day of obligation unless prevented from attending by an excusing cause.

Most of them do not have such causes, and those who do not have them are failing to fulfill an obligation that binds gravely and thus also are objectively gravely sinning.

Thus THEY should not be receiving Commuion, either, until such time as they start fulfilling their Sunday and holy day obligations and go to confession.

At least this applies in the archtypical case. (The answer may be affected by the level of knowledge and culpability an individual has.)

I know this is a difficult answer, but I’ve tried to explain it as straightforwardly and simply as I can.

The fact that you are taking steps to rectify your marital situation and that you are refraining from receiving holy Communion until you do reveals that God is working in your heart and that you are responding to his grace by working to bring your situation into conformity with his will–which is ultimately for the good of your own soul and those of your family.

This is a cause for rejoicing and, in the interim, the Church acknowledges and appreciates your efforts and wants to make you feel welcome and a part of the Catholic community. Pope Benedict has personally stressed the need to understand the pain that is experienced by couples in your situation and the need to reach out to them, to help them feel connected to the Church and to God, and to live the Catholic life.

God loves you, and the Church and the pope do, too.

20

Science & Liturgy

A reader writes:

My son went to Mass on Christmas Eve. He’s big time into evolution and tho I’ve tried to get him to read Creator and the Cosmos he wasn’t interested.  For Christmas I gave him the book The Science Before Science ( I think that’s the name) which he was hardly thrilled to get.

Anyway, at the beginning of Mass they read:

Proclamation of the Birth of Christ
from the Christmas Martyrology (Roman Rite)

The twenty-fifth day of December.
In the five thousand one hundred and ninety-ninth year of the creation of the world
from the time when God in the beginning created the heavens and the earth;
the two thousand nine hundred and fifty-seventh year after the flood;
the two thousand and fifteenth year from the birth of Abraham;….

and he took great exception to that.  He said since we KNOW that the earth was not 6000 years old at the time Christ was born we shouldn’t be reading that.  It only perpetuates a falsehood. (I wanted to say "well, were you there?  How do you know it isn’t?  Maybe the earth was created as a middle age earth….maybe mankind is only 6000 years old)  Anyway, he tried to argue that just because it’s in the Bible doesn’t mean it’s true. I said that’s not out of the Bible. His arguments were based on science and religion don’t agree. When I said they do, truth is truth…science has proven that we all come from 1 set of parents…thru DNA research…he said he doen’st think the church should sit and wait till it figures out that science is right (ie Coprenican theory of the rotation of the planets etc.).

So….not that you can argue or win an argument with someone who’s mind is made up..don’t confuse me with facts…what do you say about the reading at church and the years of the age of the earth?  Any suggestions?

It sounds to me as if you and your son have positions that are leading you into conflict unnecessarily.

From the Church’s point of view, there is not a problem with the idea that God used evolution as a means by which he accomplished his purposes in creating man and other species. Neither does the Church insist that the earth is only a few thousand years old. If your son feels that the evidence he has been exposed to points to the existence of an old earth and God’s use of evolution to realize his plans for the world then I would not fight with him about that.

If he believes, on the other hand, that evolution occurred but that God didn’t employ it and that it was a process not subject to God’s providence then I still wouldn’t fight with him about it (or give him books that he doesn’t want to read) but I would point out that at that point he is advancing a view that science has no way of proving. You don’t need to argue about that. It’s just a fact that would be worth pointing out.

I am afraid that I don’t understand completely everything that you recount your son as having said, so some of it I am not able to comment on. However, I would point out that it sounds to me as if he may be pitting science against Scripture in an unnecessary fashion.

For its part, the Church is quite open to the idea that the early material in Genesis is written in a symbolic fashion and thus that one should not expect it to pronounce on issues like the age of the earth or the specific means that God used to give rise to the creatures we now see in the world.

THIS ARTICLE MAY HELP.

As to the specific issue of the dating of Christ’s birth that was read at Mass, your son should bear in mind the genre of the literature he was hearing. This was not a scientific treatise. It was liturgy, and liturgy is in significant measure poetic.

Those dates are not and were never intended to be rock solid and precise. They were just the best estimates that were available at the time the piece was composed, and even then it was known that they were just estimates and that we really can’t date the birth of Christ with precision. People back then knew that it wasn’t a certainty that Christ was born in the 42nd year of Augustus Caesar’s reign (in fact, he was probably born a few years before that), and they knew that we can’t date the creation of the world precisely either.

So take these numbers for what they are: Old fashioned estimates that were put together a long time ago to build up a poetic proclamation to convey a sense of the grandeur and majesty of the birth of God’s Son.

Not a scientific treatise.

Recognizing the nature of liturgy is important here. It not only involves poetry but it also involves tradition. In that way, it is much like Shakespeare. If Shakespeare had written that piece and incorporated it into one of his plays then it would and should continue to be performed today–e.g., by a college drama company, even if the school does not teach in its science classes that these dates are to be taken literally.

In the same way, the Church can include traditional/poetic material in its liturgy that is not to be taken literally and that the Church does not hold forth as literally true when discussing the age of the world in a catechetical text.

See the above-linked article for more on what the Church does hold regarding creation and evolution,

SEE HERE

AND HERE.

When Vampire Novels Get It Wrong–Part III

After writing my previous post on the transfusion issues in Dracula, I ran into another factual problem with the novel. This time it isn’t medical; it’s religious.

Someone had told me about it years ago. In fact, though I was an Evangelical at the time, a friend of mine who was reading the book asked me about it to see if it squared with my understanding of Catholic belief and practice, because it sounded wrong to him.

My friend was right: It was wrong.

Or at least it would be in the real world.

Here’s the issue: Y’know how Dracula is vulnerable to crucifixes? Crucifixes are symbols of Jesus. So if he’s vulnerable to those, he ought to be vulnerable to Jesus himself. (And who isn’t?)

Now, in the novel as in the real world, Jesus isn’t available to descend from the heavens with a shout to rescue the heroes.

But he is present in the Eucharist.

And so Van Helsing (a Dutch doctor who is the leader of those arrayed against Dracula) uses the Host to ward off vampires. Specifically, he uses it in five ways:

  1. He (and others) hold up pieces of the Host in order to ward off vampires–just like they otherwise do with crucifixes (only the Host is more effective since it is more sacred as it isn’t just a symbol of Jesus).
  2. He places pieces of the Host in vampires’ coffins to keep the vampires from being able to take refuge in them.
  3. To help a woman who Dracula has been praying on, he touches a piece of the Host to the forehead, but since she is already infected with latent vampirism it burns a scar on her forehead (this was not Van Helsing’s intent, and the scar disappears when Dracula is killed, signalling that she is free).
  4. A couple of times he draws a circle on the ground, passes the Host over it, and then places fine crumbles from the Host in the circle so that vampires cannot enter or leave the circle.
  5. He takes a whitish material that is described as being like dough or putty and, after putting crumbles from a Host in it, he uses it to line the cracks of a tomb so that a vampire can’t slip into or out of the tomb through the cracks.

To any well-formed Catholic from the real world, this kind of use of the Host is profoundly offensive to pious sensibilities.

In the novel, all of this is done with great reverence, and the novel makes it very clear that Van Helsing considers the Host to be the most sacred thing there is in the whole world. He also tries to avoid using the Host in this way if he can, not wanting to expost it to the presence of evil unnecessarily.

And he explains that what he is doing is okay because he has "an indulgence."

My friend wanted to know if that sounded right to me concerning Catholic belief and practice.

Even as an Evangelical, it didn’t.

The subject is a little ambiguous, though, because what Stoker means by all this isn’t clear. For example, Van Helsing’s remark that he has an indulgence is ambigous.

Stoker may be calling to mind the common misunderstanding that an indulgence is a license to do something sinful (it’s not). If that is what he means then the novel portrays Van Helsing’s use of the Host as something that is sinful in and of itself, but it’s "okay" because Van Helsing is a Catholic and has a hoojoo way of being forgiven in advance through his indulgence.

If that’s what Stoker means then this element of the novel is based on a misunderstanding of Catholic theology, because indulgences do not give one a license to sins. Sins are always sins and cannot be forgiven in advance, only when the person repents of having done them.

On the other hand, Stoker may have meant (and badly phrased) the idea that Van Helsing has an indult allowing him to use the Host in this manner. In other words, he’s received special permission from a competent ecclesiastical authority authorizing him to do this.

If that’s what Stoker meant then the question of how the Host is used in the novel becomes more complex.

In our world, you certainly would never get an indult allowing you to use a Host in this manner. Canon law has no provisions for anything like this. But then vampires aren’t real in the real world, and so in a world where vampires are real canon law may have taken note of this fact and allowed for procedures to deal with this threat.

In fact, in such a world the Church might even have vampire extirpators who are equivalent to exorcists in our world, and Van Helsing may be such an individual.

Supposing such to be the case, what are we to make of Van Helsing’s use of the Host?

Vampire literature has already established the use of sacred things (crucifixes, holy water, rosaries) to ward off or injure vampires and if these lesser holy things do so then it would be expected that the Host would be all the more effective–in fact, the most effective thing possible. (One wonders that vampires don’t burst into flame the moment that a Host is held up to them.)

Where the revulsion comes in is the idea of exposing something so holy to something so evil. It feels like profanation.

But then . . . God allowed the devil to have access to heaven for a sigificant amount of time (see, e.g., the beginning of Job). And Jesus allowed himself to suffer for our sake on the Cross, which was certainly a profanation.

In the Host he can’t even be hurt by the presence of a vampire, nor can his heavenly beatitude be disturbed. So, intrinsically speaking, he suffers no injury.

That is true, though, of any situation in which the Eucharist is profaned, yet profanation is still morally impermissible.

The reason would not seem to be that profanation injures Jesus (it can’t) but that it involves a disrespecting ON OUR PART of the holiness of God.

We can handle the Eucharist in ways that God permits (e.g., receiving holy Communion, reserving it in the tabernacle, carrying it in Eucharistic processions) but not in ways that God does not permit. As long as we are handling the Eucharist in a way that God permits, no profanation is committed.

So in a world where vampires are real, would God allow the Eucharist to be used to ward them off?

I don’t know. He might. (He can do what he wants. He’s God.)

Certain specific ways in which Van Helsing handles the Host seem to me to be more plausible than others (at least in terms of real-world sensibilities.)

For example, holidng up a Host to cause a vampire to stop or flee seems to me to be the least problematic. In fact, something in my memory says that at some points in history (I’m NOT recommending this NOW), consecrated Hosts may have been used in exorcisms–e.g., seeing if the possessed person can tell the difference between a consecrated Host and an unconsecrated host (and thus displaying supernatural knowledge) or holding one up or touching it to the person’s forehead to compel the demon to flee.

If so then we would have a potential real-world parallel to a couple of the things that Van Helsing does (i.e., #1 and #3).

#2 is more problematic because it involves leaving the sacred species to be corrupted by the elements. By plaing the host in a dirt-filled coffin, it will be soiled and eventually the species will corrupt and the Real Presence will cease. Before that happens–in the novel–the deposition of the Host will hallow the place, though, so that it cannot be used by vampires.

#4 is more problematic yet because it involves the destruction of a Host not by the elements but by human agency–APART from the way that God has ordained–in the real-world–for humans to disassociate the sacred species (i.e., by consuming them and, when this is not possible, by dissolving them in water).

#5 is the same and even worse because not only is a Host destroyed but the remnants are then mixed with another substance.

In the novel, when #4 and #5 occur Van Helsing is said to finely crumble up a piece of the Host. If he crumbles it very finely then it will cease to appear to be pieces of bread and the Real Presence will cease, which would partially ameliorate the situation. (I.e., it would be worse to scatter or embed species that still held the Real Presence in something than to scatter or embed species that no longer held it). Unfortunately, I don’t think Stoker knows this, and I think we are meant to understand that Van Helsing believes that the Real Presence continues in these cases.

Ultimately, it’s up to God the ways in which he chooses to authorize man to handle the Eucharist, and I can’t gainsay what he might sovereignly choose to do in another world.

What I CAN say is that all of this (particularly the latter numbers) is PROFOUNDLY offensive to pious sensibilities and that it is a LITERARY FLAW in the novel for Bram Stoker to have handled things the way he did.

I suspect (as I’ll explain in a future post) that he simply didn’t understand the theological implications of significant parts of what he was writing, and so this may to some extent be a case of "Forgive them, for they know not what they do."

Quebec Is *SO* Going To Hell

Retailles_d_hosties_2Just when you thought that Quebec couldn’t get any more evil.

Turns out that there is a product being marketed up there that sells what are effectively unconsecrated hosts as SNACK CHIPS.

I am NOT kidding.

The product is known as "Retailles D’Hosties" (lit., "recut hosts")–A.K.A. in English as "Host Pieces."

"My son can eat a whole bag while he’s watching TV," Paul Saumure, a manager at another IGA store, said of his 22-year-old. "He’s had more of them outside of church than he ever did inside one."

These things have apparently been around for a while, but they are now experiencing a resurgence due to–of all things–health food concerns.

Being made from just wheat and water, they have no added salt or fat.

And if you sacrilegiously eat bags and bags of pure flour out of healthfood concerns then you deserve the diabetes that you’ll get.

Lest you think this is just a sick joke,

HERE’S AN ARTICLE ON IT FROM THE TORONTO GLOBE & MAIL.

HERE’S INFO ON ONE OF THE MANUFACTURERS.

Oh, and there’s a very interesting number of hits you get on Google if you search for "retailles d’hosties":
Retailles_d_hosties

(CHT to the reader who e-mailed.)

NYT On SDG

GET THE STORY.

NOTES:

  • Unfortunatley, SDG only gets a brief mention in the story, but it’s nice to see him getting recognition from the MSM. (He’s also been cited by Ebert.)
  • Love the NYTnoid headline: "New Cultural Approach for Conservative Christians: Reviews, Not Protests"–as if protesting movies was the only approach conservative Christians have had up till now, never having reviewed and thoughtfully interacted with and critiqued culture up to now.
  • One of the other review services mentioned in the article–MovieGuide–is an exceptionally disingenuous entity. In a MASSIVE AND UNPROFESSIONAL CONFLICT OF INTEREST the people involved act as a publicity agency for certain movies–which have a suspicious tendency to end up with positive reviews. They also have a knee-jerk Fundamentalist approach to films whose content they don’t like (i.e., "It’s morally objecitonable so it must be artistically lousy, too"). SEE HERE FOR MORE INFO.

Illicit Vs. Valid

A reader writes:

Merry Christmas Mr. Akin, I was curious if you could take a moment to
comment on the following:

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/nation/3547357.html

I am particularly interested in the "valid" and "illicit" part
associated with this Mass.

First a note for those who may not read further: "Licit" means "in conformity with the law," while "illicit" means "not in conformity with the law." A celebration of the liturgy is in conformity with the law (licit) if those celebrating it don’t break any of the Church’s laws in their celebration. It is illicit if they do break such laws.

"Valid," by contrast," means (effectively) "real," while "invalid" means "unreal."

This is important in the context of liturgy, for example, because even an unlawful (illicit) celebration of the Mass may have at its heart a valid (real) consecration of the Eucharist.

From an ultimate perspective, the FIRST question one should ask about a celebration of the Eucharist is whether it is valid (i.e., does Jesus really become present?).

The SECOND question is whether–even if Jesus does really become present–the celebration is lawful (licit) according to the Church.

Based on the first two questions, one needs to ask a THIRD question: Is attending this Mass sinful or non-sinful? If the consecration is INVALID or the Mass as a whole is ILLICIT then the answer is presumably sinful.

HERE’S MORE ON THE SITUATION IN ST. LOUIS FROM ST. LOUIS NATIVE, DR. EDWARD PETERS.

(BTW, special congratulations to Ed for finally joining the 21st century and getting REAL [valid] permalinks for his blog, which will DRAMATICALLY enhance its effectiveness. His new blog design is quite cool, too! Check it out!)

When Vampire Novels Get It Wrong–Part II

In my life, I think I’ve read three vampire stories: The Vampyre, Interview with the Vampire, and Dracula.

Each is a major landmark in vampire fiction (which is why I read them; the genre doesn’t have a lot of native appeal to me, but I’m not opposed to reading the classics in it). Yesterday I was listening to an audiobook that I made out of Dracula, and it got me to thinking about the medical aspects of vampirism, which led me to do a pair of posts on the subject.

I must say that I’m impressed with the way Bram Stoker wrote Dracula. Though, from what I can tell, Stoker was an Irish Protestant, his novel is remarkably Catholic-friendly and spends a great deal of time discussing spiritual matters.

It’s also quite cosmopolitan culturally. Though the main characters are British, there are not only representatives from different English social classes but also a lot of characters from and portraits of other cultures. As he goes to visit Count Dracula in Transylvania, Jonathan Harker describes various eastern European cultures in significant detail. Dracula himself is Transylvanian. Dracula’s nemesis–Dr. Van Helsing–is Dutch. And there’s even a major character who is a cowboy from Texas.

A special treat for me is the way that different languages and dialects bleed through into the language of the novel–as when Van Helsing speaks of things that in English are neuter using the masculine or feminine genders they would have in Dutch. (E.g., referring to "corn" [i.e., wheat] as "he" instead of "it.")

The novel is told in semi-epistolary form. An epistolary novel (in the strict sense) is one told exclusively through the use of letters written by characters in the novel, though in Dracula not only letters are used but also diary entries, telegrams, and newspaper articles. (I’m sure one day soon someone will write an e-pistolary novel told entirely through e-mails.)

So it’s a cool read.

But there are still flaws.

Some of these occurred to me when Stoker got to a particular point in the plot in which a character named Lucy had become the object of Dracula’s predations and her health was suffering. Dr. Van Helsing determines (I presume correctly) that her blood loss is sufficient that she needed transfusions in order to survive. He then sets about arranging these.

At the time, this would have been REALLY cool. I don’t know of ANY prior vampire story in which they tried to bring (then) modern science to bear on the problem of vampirism by giving blood transfusions. So megakudos to Stoker for that!

But there are some oddities for the modern reader.

One of the first things that struck me about the way the novel treated them was how DRAMATIC the transfusions were held to be. I mean, the characters were making a WAY bigger deal over transfusions than we would today.

Some of that may be natural for the time period, though, since I assume transfusions weren’t done as regularly as they are now.

One of the ways that a bigger deal is made of transfusions is that there is a big hullaballoo over who can be a donor for the procedure. Van Helsing is willing to do it himself, but his student–the English Dr. John Seward–points out that he is younger and ought to do it. Better yet is Lucy’s fiance, an even younger lord who is simple and healthy and uncomplicated–unlike the two doctors who, being engaged in intellectual pursuits by their profession, have higher strung "nerves" and are less suitable donors.

This sounds very suspicious. Old people give blood all the time today. In fact, blood banks rely HEAVILY on the generosity of older people; the young frequently being unable to be bothered with giving blood. And having an intellectual career has NOTHING to do with the ability to give blood.

Still, this may have been the 19th century understanding of things.

Another way a bigger deal is made of the transfusions than we would make of them is that discussion is made of giving the donors an opiate in order to knock them out during the procedure. I guess maybe folks back then were so horrified at the thought of giving blood that they wanted to be knocked out for it, though today people give blood all the time without any sedation at all. (I’d also have a hesitancy of giving the donor a sedative as anything that goes into his bloodstream is, of necessity, going to go into the recipient’s bloodstream in short order as the transfusion progresses–see below.)

After the transfusions are over, Van Helsing orders that the donors "eat and drink much," which is fine by modern medical science. They should do that to help their bodies replenish their blood supply.

I’m less sanguine (pun intended) regarding his advice that one of the donors should be given port wine to drink after a transfusion. I’m not sure about the effects of alcohol on a person who has just given blood (won’t that at least make him EXTRA woozy?), but I can let that pass.

What really set off alarm bells was Van Helsing administering to LUCY (the blood recpient) an opiate BEFORE the transfusion in order to knock her out.

WAIT A MINUTE! Lucy is suffering from acute posthemorrhagic anemia! She’s lost so much blood that she’s going to DIE if you don’t get more blood into her. Her blood pressure is DOWN and her heart is STRUGGLING ot beat fast enough to keep her blood pressure up and her cells oxygenated. Is giving her a sedative that will depress her system REALLY the thing to do at this moment?

"Please, Jim! Don’t leave her in the clutches of 19th-century medicine!"

Where Dracula really loses it, though, is in the fact that Van Helsing administers the blood transfusions with NO ATTEMPT WHATSOEVER to establish whether the donors have blood types that are compatible with Lucy’s blood type or not.

I’m sorry, but Dracula came out in 1897, and blood typing began (in a rudimentary form) almost a hundred years earlier. Doctors had realized that far back that the reason that people often died from blood transfusions was that they had different types of blood than the donors. It was the discovery of blood typing that ALLOWED transfusions to begin to become commonplace. Previously it was too dangerous.

Now, I’m not an expert on the history of medicine, and it could be that a doctor in 1897 would have made no attempt to type the blood of a donor and a recipient, but it seems to me that almost a century after this discovery–when it was this discovery that really allowed blood transfusions to take off–that a supergenius such as Dr. Van Helsing should have been on top of this one.

So, like later authors of vampire stories, I think that Stoker could have done with a little more medical research amidst his admirable cultural and historical researches.

That doesn’t stop the book from being a really cool read, though.

GET THE STORY (FROM PROJECT GUTENBERG).

UPDATE: Further investigation reveals that Van Helsing did just fine by not checking for blood typing. The original criticism was based on a Wikipedia statement that blood typing was discovered in the first decade of the 19th century, but whoever wrote that was wrong. It now appears that blood typing was not described in medical literature until three years after Dracula appeared.

When Vampire Novels Get It Wrong–Part I

I admit it: I nitpick the science in novels I read.

Take Anne Rice’s Interview With A Vampire–those best-known vampire novel of the last few decades. When I read this novel, I couldn’t help being distracted by the fact that, when the vampires in it are draining blood from someone they can hear the person’s heartbeat (okay, I can buy that part; Rice’s vampires have supersensitive senses, including hearing) and the person’s heartbeat is getting slower and slower until the vampire drains so much blood that the person dies.

"This is not what would happen," I said to myself.

A person about to die from vampire predation would be suffering from acute posthemorrhagic anemia, whose symptoms are known, though in the real world they are more commonly caused by accidents than vampire predation. The symptioms include faintness, dizziness, thirst, and sweating. Gradually slowing heartbeat AIN’T one of them, though.

In fact, you get just the opposite.

If you suddenly lose a whole bunch of blood then there is a mechanical process that takes place which is relatively easy to understand. With the sudden subtraction of a bunch of your blood volume that means you’ve got LESS blood in your circulatory system. That means that your blood pressure goes DOWN. That means that your heart will pump FASTER to try to keep your blood pressure up so that oxygen can keep getting to your cells, and you will go into TACHYCARDIA.

Eventually, the amount of blood loss will overtax the heart’s ability to pump fast so that it can’t push through enough blood because the chambers don’t have the chance to fill completely and the heartbeat will be rapid and weak. The heart itself will also start suffering oxygen deprivation and you’ll have a myocardial infarction or "heart attack." Eventually you get things like uncontrollable falling blood pressure and fatal cardiac arrythmias.

Not quite so romantic–eh?

But in Interview with the Vampire it’s such a seductive experience that the vampires have to STOP themselves from draining a victim so that they don’t get drug down into death with him.

Why that is, I’m not sure. If all you’re doing is moving blood from the victim to yourself then (assuming you can metabolize blood), you’d be STRONGER as the victim gets closer to death.

What’s more, the process of killing a victim by vampirism would be so revolting that it would have built-in factors that would cause you to want to let go at a certain point.

Unless vampires do something that allows them to bypass the normal rules of cardiology, their victims’ hearts won’t just slow gently down as they drop into the sleep of death. It’ll be a much more traumatic thing than that with the victims’ hearts speeding up, getting faster and weaker and more irregular until the victim dies, possibly amid classic heart attack symptoms like chest pain and numbness in the left arm and nausea and vomiting and dizziness and things like that.

ICK!

What vampire wouldn’t want to pull away before THAT happens!

Reading the novel, I also found myself wondering: "Just how long do these vampire predations go on? Wouldn’t it take quite a long time to get enough blood out of a person to kill him?"

It turns out that the amount of blood you can lose without dying depends on how fast you lose it. If you lose it rapidly, you can only stand to lose about 1/3rd of your blood volume (3-4 pints). But if you lose it slowly–say, over a 24 hour period–you can lose up to 2/3rds of your blood volume (6-8 pints). If a vampire sucked you dry slowly, over the course of a day, he could get a lot more out of you before you died, but that isn’t the way vampire predations are typically depicted. They’re much faster things.

So in a classic vampire attack, the vampire would only be able to pull 3-4 pints of blood out of a person before the person died.

That’s still a LOT of blood–especially if it’s being taken from two little holes in the blood vessels of the neck. I mean, I assume from the way that vampire attacks on the neck are classically depicted that they’re either going after the carotid artery or the jugular vein, but even though these are large blood vessels, it seems to me that it would take a significant amount of time to suck 3-4 pints out of one of these, especially (in the case of the carotid artery) without starving the brain of oxygen and causing the victim to go unconscious for that reason (as opposed to hypnotism or something).

Such long predations might be possible in the seclusion of a house, but not in a darkened alley in London with lots of people walking around and stuff.

Now, I know that vampires are supposed to be supernatural beings who may have ways of circumventing what would normally happen in the real world in such situations (like their ability to hypnotize the victim into staying still for all of this), but I still think that the authors of vampire stories could do with some medical research as part of all the other research (e.g., of a historical nature) that they do for their stories.

The Economics Of Execution

There are certain pieces of "conventional wisdom" that I’m quite skeptical of. One of them is "The death penalty doesn’t really deter murders." Really? How do we know this? Whether one supports or opposes capital punishment, this claim is at least counterintuitive.

It would seem that executing a murderer would at least prevent him from committing repeat offenses and deter those murders–whether or not it scares off potential murderers from killing others. Further, isn’t the whole idea of having penalties attached to laws generally regarded as providing a deterrent? Why should this penalty be any different? Could the "it doesn’t save lives" argument be just wishful thinking?

I can imagine arguments that having the death penalty fosters a culture of death such that it actually leads to more murders. Maybe. Weird things like that happen. But where’s the data?

That’s why it’s nice that God created economists. They can be a big help in testing received bits of conventional wisdom and seeing if they hold up or if they’re just wishful or prima facie thinking.

The Sydney Morning Herald recently carried an op/ed piece touching on this that was startling:

NEVER have those of us who oppose the death penalty felt more convinced that we are right. And never has there been a series of more impressive-sounding arguments to suggest that we are wrong.

For most of the past century we have been secure in the belief that executing murderers does little to stop murder. That’s what the psychologists and the criminologists have told us.

But now economists have entered the debate. And they have brought to the task a dazzling range of highly sophisticated techniques originally developed to answer more prosaic questions, such as whether tax breaks encourage saving.

More often than not the economists find that executions do save lives.

As they starkly report their central finding: each execution results in an average of 18 fewer murders. Or, to present the finding in an even more unsettling way: any state that refuses to impose the death penalty for murder is condemning 18 or so innocent people to death.

Now, I know that claims of this nature are controversial and subject to testing and revision and reversal themselves, but it’s nice to have additional research being done. That’s how science–including criminology–moves forward.

READ THE STORY.

READ THE SUNSTEIN-VERMUELE PAPER. (WARNING! Evil file format [.pdf]!)

DISCUSS.