Kremlin’s bizarre bloody bathing

Joy Ride
4 min readApr 3, 2022

Balneum animale in red deer’s blood

Photo by shahin khalaji on Unsplash

The last time the medical community considered the benefits of bathing in animal blood was in 1848. Gray’s Supplement to the Pharmacopoeia mentioned a bizarre procedure “to transfer vitality from a killed animal to a human” by wrapping parts of the animal around the human. The young Kaiser Wilhelm II had left-arm palsied from birth and was given this treatment.

Now, these bizarre treatments are the Kremlin’s mainstream spa procedures.

In 1868, Chambers’s Encyclopædia suggested that animal blood baths were effective for lameness (change in gait, usually in response to pain somewhere in a limb). “A medicated bath is one in which medicated substances are mixed with water. This is one of the most important methods of medical art, bringing the remedies to bear upon the system. The medical substances used in 1868 were salt, soda, vinegar, wine, essential oils, and even animal milk, blood, bouillon of meat”, says Chambers’s Encyclopædia. Since 1868, no medical evidence in modern medicine exists that animal blood or blood products are beneficial for human health.

In 2010, Lady Gaga appeared in a meat suit stating one’s need to fight for what one believes in.

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Joy Ride

Learner, writer, biotech investor, research translation, drug development, genetics. 4-lingual.