#cincinnati schochet

[handeaux]

Not Exactly Vampires, Many Cincinnatians Indulged A Craving For Fresh Blood

A curious article appeared in the Cincinnati Medical Advance for November 1875, alerting local doctors that a number of their patients had adopted a peculiar diet.

“It may not be generally known that, like New York, Cincinnati has its blood drinkers – consumptives and others who daily visit the slaughterhouses to obtain the invigorating draught of ruddy life-elixir, fresh from the veins of beeves. Lawrence’s slaughter house, opposite the Oliver Street Police Station, has its daily visitants who drink blood; and the slaughter houses of the Loewensteins on John Street, a few squares away have perhaps half a dozen visitants of the same class.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Back when Cincinnati butchers operated abattoirs all over the fringes of the downtown area, they provided free blood to anyone who stopped by and asked for a glass. It is no surprise that a macabre practice such as this would attract Cincinnati’s legendary chronicler of the bizarre, Lafcadio Hearn, and indeed it did. Hearn published his report of a visit to the Loewensteins in the 26 July 1876 edition of the Cincinnati Commercial.

“Between the hours of 2 and 4 o’clock almost any afternoon, the curious visitor may observe many handsomely dressed ladies and others enter the cleanly, well-kept establishment in question, and waiting, glass in hand, for a draught of crimson elixir, yet warm from the throat of some healthy bullock. Just as soon as the neck of the animal is severed by one rapid slash of the ‘Schochet’s’ long blade, glass after glass is held to the spouting veins and quickly handed to the invalids, who quaff the red cream with evident signs of pleasure, and depart their several ways.”

Hearn’s reference to a Schochet identifies the Lowenstein slaughter house as following kosher practices. The Schochet is a ritual slaughterer, certified by the local rabbi to practice his craft. That the Loewenteins followed kosher practice was an important distinction for Hearn, who had previously described his displeasure while observing gentile butchery.

“Many who can drink the blood of animals slaughtered according to the Hebrew fashion, can not stomach that of bullocks felled with the ax. The blood of the latter is black and thick and lifeless; that of the former bright, ruddy and clear as new wine.”

While most of Cincinnati’s blood drinkers were satisfied with a single tumbler of fresh blood, Hearn relates the experience of a “short, well-built but pallid-looking” man who downed glass after glass of blood and strolled away, apparently satiated. When he next reappeared, ten days later, he was asked if all that blood had made him queasy or nauseous. He replied that he could drink gallons of blood at a time but confessed that his latest sanguinary binge had caused him to go blind for a week.

“Yet, having recovered his vision, he believed that he could see better than ever.”

Hearn interviewed several doctors who insisted that drinking fresh beef blood could never produce blindness, temporary or otherwise. In fact, most of Hearn’s medical informants told him they discouraged their patients from imbibing in slaughter-house blood at all.

“I have always warned my consumptive patients against drinking blood,” one doctor told Hearn. “The latter practice is both morally and physically detrimental.”

Despite medical objections, Hearn gulped a tall glass of blood himself and provided detailed tasting notes.

“Fancy the richest cream, warm, with a tart sweetness, and the healthy strength of the pure wine ‘that gladdeneth the heart of man!’ It was a draught simply delicious, sweeter than any concoction of the chemist, the confectioner, the winemaker – it was the very elixir of life itself.”

A decade later, according to an article in the Cincinnati Times [12 February 1885] Cincinnatians were still lining up for bloody drinks. The Times reporter asked an emaciated man how his unusual dietary supplement tasted.

“Like salted milk,” he replied. “And some put salt in the blood, but I do not feel that it makes it more palatable.”

The Times recorded a visit to the slaughter house by a man of eighty years in age, who had walked three miles to get a glass of blood. He claimed that he had been a near invalid when a friend suggested a regular glass of the stuff. The old man boasted he now walked six miles a day and felt stronger than he had when he was fifty.

The proprietor informed the Times that his slaughter house always kept a supply of dark blue glasses on hand for new patients. The tinted glass disguised the color of the drink they were offered and allowed them to get used to the taste. After a few visits, the very demeanor of the blood drinkers changed, often radically.

“I know of one person whom it did change in that way. At first she could not bear even the sight of blood, and was weak, sickly, delicate and timid, but finally she got all over this and liked to see a steer killed, especially if the beast was game.”

One bloody quaff certainly had a dramatic effect on Lafcadio Hearn, who sailed off into a rhapsodic endorsement of this strange elixir, tempered by a premonition that a taste of blood might result in a decidedly unwanted transformation of character.

“No other earthly draught can rival such crimson cream, and its strength spreads through the veins with the very rapidity of wine. Perhaps this knowledge originated that terrible expression, ‘drunk with blood.’ That the first draught will create a desire for a second; that a second may create an actual blood-thirstiness in the literal sense of the word; that such a thirst might lead to the worst consequence in a coarse and brutal nature, we are rather inclined to believe is not only possible, but probable.”

The Schochet informed Hearn that he himself, following Mosaic law, had never tasted blood. Hearn, after pondering the effects of a single warm glass, advised the “healthy and vigorous” to follow the instructions of Moses and abstain. Hearn feared that blood-drinking, while beneficial to the sickly and infirm, would drive healthy individuals onto a bestial quest for even more vile excesses.

“Perhaps it was through occasional indulgence in a draught of human blood (before men’s veins were poisoned with tobacco and bad liquor) that provoked the monstrous cruelty of certain Augustinian Emperors.”