Human beings have always known about blood. In civilisations since the earliest stone age hunter gatherers until today, too much blood has been spilt. But what we’ve known about blood has, for most of time, been completely wrong. Thank God we finally got it right.

This programme’s about the world that war has made so in this programme I’m going to tell you a bloody good story – which is what war is all about after all – about how we finally got to understand blood and save millions of lives.

Tag words: Shylock; William Shakespeare; Merchant of Venice; Galen; Roman Empire; David Bentley-Hart; Paracelsus; William Harvey; Exercitato Anatomica; Richard Lower; George Washington; Arthur Coda; Royal Society of London; Karl Landsteiner; Carl von Ossietzky; Plasma; Charles Drew; Dr John Beattie; John Scudder; Blood for Britain; Blitz; American Red Cross; Out for Blood; Anastasia Lunquist; Ernie Pyle; Major General Norman T. Kirk;