Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Mysterious, Miraculous World of Blood
with Rose George
Directions for the event upon arrival at City Hospital:
Use Gate B (opposite Claremont St) on the Lisburn Rd entrance. From here you will see a blue/green sculpture approx. 150 metres away walk towards it and this is outside the front of the Postgraduate School. The Lecture Theatre is signposted within the building.
Most humans contain between 9 and 12 pints of blood. Here Rose George, who probably contains 9 pints, tells 9 different stories about the liquid that sustains us, discovering what it reveals about who we are. In Nepal, she meets girls challenging the taboos surrounding menstruation; in the Canadian prairies, she visits a controversial plasma clinic; in Wales she gets a tour of the UK’s only leech farm to learn about the vital role the creatures still play in modern surgery, and in a London hospital she accompanies a medical team revolutionising the way we treat trauma.
In conversation with Hugh Odling-Smee, Rose George reveals the richness and wonder of the potent red fluid that courses around our bodies, unseen but miraculous. Rose George is the author of A Life Removed: Hunting for Refuge in the Modern World; The Big Necessity: Adventures in the World of Human Waste, and Deep Sea and Foreign Going: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry that Brings You 90% of Everything. She contributes regularly to the London Review of Books, the Guardian, the Independent and others.