Knowing Blood / Sang sens

Powerful and evocative yet multifarious and enigmatic—blood seeps into our everyday experiences. Varied cultural and social perspectives have blood to be at once universal, divisive, and transformative, carrying meanings ranging from health, personhood, and sex to identity, religion, and family. How have these many meanings coloured how blood has been known and observed in modern medicine? Our res

ponse is curated in six cases highlighting distinctive but closely interrelated themes, all supplemented with a wealth of multimedia discoverable through the touch table. These texts, images, and objects united from across and beyond McGill University’s collections reveal blood’s many facets: as an forensic object bearing hidden truths and an experimental subject represented in images and models; as a lurid signal of lethal pathogens and a crimson beacon of lifesaving treatments; as scattered cells stained in pastel hues on glass slides and schematic maps categorizing the world into different types; as an excess quantity to be let into barber-surgeon’s basins and a pulse to be measured with sophisticated instruments. We invite you to explore this rich 400-year history of knowing and observing the most vital of bodily fluids.