Storing blood?

[Ireth]

The main character of my vampire novel Low Road (three guesses what he is) is, for the bulk of the story, living in a castle in the Scottish highlands, circa 1360 AD. He needs to drink blood roughly every six hours to keep fully sated and nourished, but I've realized that having him go out and slaughter four deer in the course of 24 hours is a very impractical way of keeping fed -- he'd run out of prey very very fast. So I need a way for him to store excess blood from each kill, in such a way that it won't spoil over time (if blood does that. I don't know.).

I was thinking he could pour the blood into bottles or jars, which he'd store in the wine cellar of the castle for later consumption, but would this be practical or even feasible? Given that this is the Middle Ages, without the convenience of modern refrigeration technology, how long would each bottle of blood be expected to last?

 

[Steerpike]

I'd expect it to go bad very quickly, and of course you have clotting issues to worry about (maybe he could use leeches to solve the clotting problem, but it seems like it would take a lot, and I'm not sure how long it would suffice). Without refrigeration, I'd be very surprised if you could store it more than a day at the outside.

 

[Ireth]

Yeah, that's still pretty inconvenient. The most logical thing to do would be to change how often he needs to feed, but that would require massive amounts of retconning in the dozens of pages I've already established as canon -- there are other stories outside of this novel which are considered to be canonical in many respects, the feeding issue being one of them.

I do plan on having him feed on predatory animals such as wolves as well as prey animals like deer, to keep the ecosystem in balance, but it still seems inconvenient. Perhaps if he learned how to take blood without killing the animals every time, he might be able to make his free-range blood supply last longer. And on the plus side, there's likely little chance of humans competing with him for game. What human would want to target a deer with bizarre bite marks of unknown origin all over it?

 

[Rikilamaro]

What if he doesn't kill the prey he feeds off of? Perhaps he has a herd of goats or sheep on his castle's grounds and he feeds off of them in small sips instead of draining them dry?

 

[Ireth]

That's a good idea, Riki, though I think getting started with his flock might be a problem. Buying animals from a market would be hard, as the vampire in question is deliberately trying to survive away from humans so he doesn't wind up killing them (though that idea eventually backfires epically on him in a major plot point). Stealing from other people's pastures would be a bad idea, and waiting for them to mate, and for the babies to mature enough for him to be able to drink as much blood as he needs per meal without killing them, would be problematic. Drinking in sips isn't very practical either; he needs bigger meals to keep his thirst under control. How long would you be able to survive on a mouthful of bread and a sip of water at intervals?

 

[edd]

just some of my ideas
1) if he lives in a castle can he not have lots of servants to feed off slowly? or slaves locked in the dungeon?
2) People could come to him and offer them selves to him to stop him from killing or a chance to become a vampire.
3) farming animals

 

[Steerpike]

Also, back in the day they used to store beer (among other things) in cool underground caverns. If you could address the clotting issue, perhaps the blood could stored underground where it is cool enough that it may last two or three weeks.

 

[Devor]

He could breed rabbits.

 

[Ireth]

edd: Thanks for your suggestions. I think the third one would be best; the other two are out-of-character and contrary to the plot. Olan isn't the type to keep slaves (that's something I reserve for the villain), and for the first two years of his life in the castle, he's completely alone save for another vampire, so even if he were so inclined, there's nobody who COULD be his slave or servant. He deliberately avoids interaction with humans for their safety and his own. I doubt he would feed even from a willing person, as he feels it's morally wrong. Also, drinking human blood would corrupt him both physically and mentally, which is something he wants to avoid at all costs.

Steerpike: That's exactly what I was going for with the wine cellar idea, as I stated in my original post. I just wasn't sure how long the blood would keep.

Devor: True, but how much blood is there in a rabbit? He'd have to drain a lot of them for one meal, I would think, no matter how fast they breed.

 

[edd]

depends may be you can add a magical artifact:

some thing that takes the blood of foes and stores it for him, to use at a later date.
he goes to war to stock up as it were every so often.

Like full metal alchemist :
may be having a way to converting from something else into blood.

 

[Steerpike]

Ireth - I'm not sure what you typically consider a wine cellar would be cool enough. I've been into some of the caverns in St. Louis that were used for that purpose, and you have to go down a shaft and it is pretty cold in there. Unless I was just thinking of "cellar" differently than you. If it is cold enough to be "refrigeration" then it should last three weeks or so.

 

[Saigonnus]

I was going to suggest the raising of livestock for the purpose of feeding. It would probably be the larger animals that could survive having relatively large amounts of blood taken without them dying. It would take much to rig up a system that drains a pint or two at a time and it shouldn't take more than a couple days to recoup that (from the animal's perspective) with a regular diet and water. You could easily have enough blood in a small herd of cattle if you rotate them by a schedule to provide his daily needs without the need of storage.

I also read that tumeric and ginger are natural anti-coagulants as well as anything containing vitamin E (avocado, nuts, whole grain cereals). It could be possible to make a "grog" with blood, wine and some of those to make it possible to store it for a while longer than plain blood.

 

[ascanius]

Just putting the blood somewhere cold will only slow the eventual purification of the blood. If microoganisms are present cold only slows the metabolic processes of the microorganisms, this is why milk will still spoil if left in the fridge for too long. Believe it or not but you can actually store organic matter such as blood, hell even fruit juice in a warm room for very long time. Check out Pasteur and spontaneous generation. What he did was took a flask and boiled meat juices in the flask. the then took the flask and heated up the glass of the neck and drew it out and down them back up, a swan necked flask. The flask is still open to the environment but the meat juices never purified or decayed. This is the basis, to an extent, of canning. Boiling the organic matter kills bacteria, non spore forming, and if nothing is able to contaminate the organic matter then it will last indefinitely. So you could actually store the blood by canning, boiling. All that needs to be done is sterilization of the blood, boiling, then making absolutely sure it does not get contaminated.

I'll be honest in that I technically don't know if this would work for blood because I don't know what microoganisms metabolize blood, gram pos or neg, or if they are spore forming. That is a question for someone who studies pathology of the blood. But I would assume that if the work area is clean, and the source also, then it would work.

 

[Kit]

Stored blood certainly clots, if you don't add an anticoagulant, but there's no real reason one could not still consume the blood clotted. It separates out with the yellow serum on top (this is one of the things that makes me roll my eyes at vampire TV shows and movies- they pull stored blood out and it's all red- FAIL!). You'd have to mix it back up. At room temp, you start to worry about microorganisms contaminating it within a few hours. When you hang a bag of blood for a hospital patient, if it's not all transfused within 4 hours you have to throw the remainder away. This may or may not be a problem depending on how resistant to disease/sickness your vampires are. Many vampires are written fairly Teflon-ish and may not need to worry about such trifles as salmonella poisoning or getting a queasy belly from sour blood. Additionally, transfusing blood right into blood vessels is more ticklish than consuming it. The stomach is a lead-lined acid bath that can take a lot of abuse and garbage- unlike your blood vessels, which will revolt quickly and emphatically if you introduce something bad into them.

It is stored at around 4 degrees C. You can't freeze (or boil) it because the red blood cells are fragile and will burst (this fragility is the reason for a lot of specific caretaking measures regarding how you handle blood, including temp).

The biggest problem for a believable storyline here (for anyone who is biologically and/or medically inclined) is that chemical changes start happening fairly soon after you remove the blood from the body. I am no connoisseur of blood (I test it, I don't taste it), but it would seem reasonable to expect the taste to go severely downhill within a few hours, and worsen from there, to the point of unpalatability. The nutritional content would likely degrade quite a lot as well.

 

[DavidJae]

Some Vampires had a collection of human 'vassals', sometimes willing, sometimes less so, whom they would feed off. Thismsy make an interesting plot twist, to add a human ally who helps sustain him. Otherwise, he could just build a large icehouse. LOL

 

[Caged Maiden]

Sorry I tried to post this last night, but for some reason it didn't post. It goes along with what Kit was saying.

Yeah blood spoils pretty quickly, and even in a sealed bottle it has a very limited shelf life. Also, don't ask how I know this, but it tastes different when stored for even a short time. What if he can't stomach stored or cold blood? If he can't have people around, and he can't raise livestock, I think magic might be your best option. What if he were able to say mix some blood into wine and therefore allow wine to provide him some sustenance?

 

[Ireth]

edd: There isn't very much magic in my story, aside from a couple of enchanted artifacts; I'm not sure I could bend the rules of the story believably to do something like you suggest. Thanks for the suggestion though.

Steerpike: It's entirely possible that we have different ideas of what a cellar is. I also don't know what the interior of Eilean Donan (or any castle, really) would have looked like in the 1300's, so I have no idea how far underground the wine cellar would have been.

Saigonnus: Those are interesting suggestions: I hadn't thought of adding something to the blood to keep it from congealing. I'll do some research on that and see what he might be able to do.

ascanius: I think Kit provided the answer to your suggestion: boiling the blood may not be a good idea. Also, I'm not sure how one would go about sterilizing it, especially in the Middle Ages when things were not typically as clean as they are now.

Kit: Those are interesting points to consider. My vampires get nauseous if they try to eat any solid food, because their bodies can't digest it. I imagine congealed blood might have that effect as well. And it would be interesting to have a vampire get queasy from blood that's gone bad, but if there's a large chance of that happening it might be more trouble than it's worth, for me as well as my characters. Having the poor guy vomit up most of the blood he drinks because it's gone bad would not do him any good.

On another note, maybe I could do something with the separation issue. From what I know about blood, all of the proteins and other beneficial things are in the red blood cells, while the yellow plasma is just liquid volume. If he could drain off the plasma and leave the separated red blood cells, he might be able to consume just the red blood cells and have as much nourishment as he would if the blood and plasma were mixed. It'd take up less space, for one thing, so he could store more of it; it'd also be more potent without the plasma diluting it, so he wouldn't have to consume as much to be properly nourished.

DavidJae: This particular vampire is morally opposed to drinking human blood, as it will physically and mentally corrupt him, and the process is irreversible except by one method which he is completely unaware of. An ice house is a good idea, though it would only work in the winter; storing the blood properly the rest of the year would still be a problem.

anihow: As I said to edd, this story has very little magic, and nothing of the sort that could help him with this. Raising livestock is his best bet, I think, as long as he can get started without having to resort to stealing or something. I'm not sure how well mixing blood with wine would work, as it seems to me that the blood would be at its most nourishing when it's undiluted. He'd have to drink a lot more of the blood/wine mixture to get as much nourishment as a meal of pure blood.

 

[Butterfly]

Is there anyway he could make a blood pudding / black pudding?

 

[Kit]

On another note, maybe I could do something with the separation issue. From what I know about blood, all of the proteins and other beneficial things are in the red blood cells, while the yellow plasma is just liquid volume. If he could drain off the plasma and leave the separated red blood cells, he might be able to consume just the red blood cells and have as much nourishment as he would if the blood and plasma were mixed. It'd take up less space, for one thing, so he could store more of it; it'd also be more potent without the plasma diluting it, so he wouldn't have to consume as much to be properly nourished.

Yes. In fact, the little clear plastic bags of blood you see on TV are usually "packed red blood cells" with the plasma drained off. You could do this with a centrifuge (there are low-tech ways to accomplish the same thing) or just by letting the blood sit a while. It takes maybe a half hour, 40 min for one test tube of blood, sitting at room temp, to separate out and then you can suck the plasma off the top with an eyedropper or something. It would take longer for a larger amount of blood.

However, you've still got all the other issues: bacterial contamination, chemical breakdown and (we assume) resultant decline of taste and nutrition, and the fragility of the red blood cells. If the red blood cells lyse (break), the chemicals in them leak out and it's pretty much ruined for everything.

 

[DavidJae]

According to folklore, there is a mental component to Vampire feeding that goes beyond the physical need for blood, focusing on some sort of dominant or symbiotic relationship, akin to love or interdependency. Perhaps this could, in part, substitute for the need for blood. Hope this helps.