Cecils current article got me thinking. When you give blood, could they keep hooking up a new bag until all (or most of) your blood drained out. How long would it take to drain a human?
I would think that they could get, maybe 5 pints before the stream slows down as the heart starves and arrests and blood pressure drops to nil and the remaining blood pools in various places.
Perhaps the best way to drain the most blood would be to access many different sites at once and get as much as possible before shut down.
I don’t know how long that would be though.
But through one access line, draining a human wouldn’t work due to being too slow.
I don’t know if an embalmer would be able to answer this one.
Their subjects ain’t exactly warm.
It depends.
Using blood donation techniques - that is, a small bore line and small bags - no, they couldn’t get more than half probably before you went into cardiac arrest.
Now, slitting someone’s caratoid, juglar, or other very large blood vessel - THAT could result in a lot of blood leaving in a hurry.
My grandparents used to own a funeral home, many long years ago (in other words, this second hand knowledge is probably out of date) but when embalming I believe they use a pump of some sort to drive blood out of the body and replace it with embalming fluid.
An alternative (used by hunters) is to sever a large blood vessel in the neck and hang the carcass up by the ankles, to allow gravity to assist in the drainage and thereby do a more complete job.
So can they drain all your blood out? Yes - with some mechanical assistance. Not by simply slitting a blood vessel.
If you were gravity feeding something in while taking out blood, how long would the heart keep going? Could a person embalm themselves?
There was a programme on UK TV about a decade ago about the Japanese WW2 UNIT 731, which carried out Bacteriological warfare and other experiments on Allied and Chinese prisoners.
In the programme they talked about the Japanese jumping up and down on the bodies of “experimental” subjects to ensure that they removed as much blood as possible from their bodies.
Nice people!