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Basic Information

Bite-Sized Bloodborne Series

TRANSCRIPT

Bite-Sized Bloodborne #1 - Paarl & The Spark Hunters

Bite-Sized Bloodborne #2 - The Blood Saints

Bite-Sized Bloodborne #3 - Weapons of (Medical) War

Basic Information

The YouTube channel Charred Thermos is a channel exclusively focused on Bloodborne lore, primarily the literary sources, historical figures and events that inspired the story, characters, items and settings of the game.

UPDATE: Unfortunately Charred Thermos decided to delete his youtube channel along with his videos due to personal reasons, thus archiving effort was made and most of his videos are accessible on archive.org, links added below.

[wiki] The True Story of Bloodborne Video Series

[wiki] Bite-Sized Bloodborne Video Series

Bite-Sized Bloodborne Series

[Archive.org] Bite-Sized Bloodborne #1: Paarl & The Spark Hunters When we come upon Darkbeast Paarl, its lifeless body suddenly reanimates with the power of electricity. While Paarl might invoke the spirit of Frankenstein, these literary comparisons are just the beginning. Behind Frankenstein—and quite likely behind Paarl and Bloodborne's Spark Hunters—is the shocking real-life field of study of the 18th and 19th century known as galvanism.

[Archive.org] Bite-Sized Bloodborne #2: The Blood Saints The Blood Saints of the Healing Church are bit players compared with the Church's prominent clerics and hunters such as Ludwig, Laurence and Amelia. But these little-known saints play a surprisingly outsized role in Bloodborne's medical metaphor. The clues lie in the Blood Saints' status as nuns of the Church who give their blood in an act of charity.

[Archive.org] Bite-Sized Bloodborne #3: Weapons of (Medical) War Axes have long been weapons of war on continents across the globe, so the Hunter's Axe doesn't seem out of place among Bloodborne's introductory weapons. But why are we given a cane and a saw as our other options? And why was the Saw Cleaver chosen as the weapon featured on the game's cover art and in its opening cinematic? By turning again to the game's central medical metaphor, we find our answers.

TRANSCRIPT

Bite-Sized Bloodborne #1 - Paarl & The Spark Hunters | Google Docs Link

In the pantheon of Bloodborne’s bosses, Darkbeast Paarl is in a class by itself. That’s because unlike other bosses, Paarl is dead.

In the enclosure between Old Yharnam and Yahar’gul, Paarl’s body lies motionless, partially submerged in the soil. Just like an old corpse, it has no flesh, no eyes and no blood. But as we approach this pile of bones and fur, some sort of strange electricity suddenly brings Paarl back to life.

If Paarl’s electricity-induced resurrection brings to mind Frankenstein, that’s probably by design. It’s generally understood that Bloodborne leans heavily on the giants of gothic horror. If you’ve followed my channel, you know I’ve argued that Bloodborne borrowed liberally from “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” with its central theme of transformation brought about by the abuse of medicinal agents. In a similar vein, the invigorating sparks that reanimate the carcasse of Darkbeast Paarl at first seems to be a wink at Mary Shelley’s classic of Victorian horror. But there’s more than just a literary homage at play here. As we’ll see in this episode of Bite-Sized Bloodborne, just like Dr. Victor Frankenstein and his monster, Paarl and the so-called Spark Hunters appear to be inspired by the shocking real-life biological and medical experiments of the 17 and 1800s.

Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” was published in 1818 and centers on the protagonist Dr. Victor Frankenstein, a man who was enthralled by alchemy and the burgeoning natural sciences around the turn of the 19th century. The doctor’s fascination with what we might today call electrochemistry leads him on a quest to create life by his own hands—specifically, to imbue life into inanimate albeit organic matter. In order to create what would become known as Frankenstein’s monster, the doctor gathers raw materials in a rather unseemly manner. As Shelley writes, these materials were the bones “collected from charnel-houses” and masses of dead flesh from “the dissecting room.” The early 1800s was the height of anatomical dissection, after all.

Shelley’s language in the original story is rather vague when it comes to the process by which Frankenstein’s monster turns from a pile of dead flesh and bone into a living creature, but one line from the novel stands out. Describing the moment the monster comes to life, our narrator Dr. Frankenstein recounts, “With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.”

Countless adaptations of the story would treat the moment of reanimation as a frenetic scene of lightning strikes and flying sparks that powered metallic contraptions that seem far ahead of their time. But scholars of Victorian literature and of the history of science have almost universally acknowledged that what inspired Shelley’s character, Dr. Frankenstein, and his experiments using electricity on the dead was the real-life scientific study known as galvanism.

Galvanism emerged as a field of study in the late 18th century thanks largely to the work of Italian researcher Luigi Galvani, a medical doctor who focused on comparative anatomy. Galvani, who obtained an electrostatic machine in the 1770s, introduced it into his anatomical experiments and observed that the severed legs of dead frogs could twitch and spasm when exposed to an electric current. Galvani and many of his European contemporaries were inspired by the Renaissance-era theory of irritability—essentially, that organic tissues respond to all manner of stimuli, be it kinetic, chemical or other. These Enlightenment-era thinkers presumed that there was a sort of life force or spirit of the nerves that could be stimulated by electricity. This hypothetical force was known as “animal electricity.” If this force was truly the source of all life, these researchers thought, then perhaps electricity could be harnessed to heal all manner of ailments and, on a much grander scale, to revive the dead. While Galvani’s experiments in the 1780s primarily involved electrically stimulating the severed legs of frogs, later experiments on the severed heads and limbs of mammals paved the way for galvanism to make the jump to human subjects—sometimes to horrifying effect. In January of 1803, Galvani’s nephew and fellow scientist Giovanni Aldini obtained the body of convicted killer George Forster, whose corpse was brought straight from the gallows to the Royal College of Surgeons of London to be dissected and experimented on for medical study. Aldini was on a European tour and had come to London at the behest of the Royal Humane Society to determine whether galvanism could be used to successfully revive sufferers of asphyxiation, primarily drowning victims. Forster, who had been hanged just an hour earlier, was to be the test subject. Using a galvanic battery of copper and zinc plates, Aldini applied a rod to Forster’s head, causing the jaw to quiver and his facial muscles to contort. His left eye even suddenly opened. According to Aldini’s notes, additional shocks prompted Forster’s body to convulse “almost to give an appearance of reanimation.” In the end, galvanism couldn’t revive Forster, proving the limits of this promising line of study.

It’s often asserted that Aldini and his experiments with galvanism in London served as the main inspiration for Dr. Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s eponymous novel. A popular theory is that English surgeon Anthony Carlisle, who was in attendance for Aldini’s galvanism experiment, must have shared his firsthand account of the event during an 1803 dinner party hosted by William Godwin, Mary Shelley’s father. Shelley would have been only 5 years old at the time, but perhaps she heard the story from her father in later years. A more likely theory is that Shelley’s husband, Percy Shelley, stoked her interest in galvanism, as he himself was fascinated by the subject, had lightly dabbled with it while a student at Oxford and remained an avid reader of books on the potential of reanimation.

Continued study of electrophysiology by physicians of the early 1800s, including that of Scottish scientist Andrew Ure, would stoke public fears about resurrecting the dead. But the fruits of this work ultimately would save many lives.

By the mid-1800s, surgeons in England and Scotland came to rely on electric shock in cases when a patient’s heart or respiration stopped as a result of overexposure to ether and chloroform anesthesia. Much like modern-day doctors use a defibrillator to shock the heart back into action, surgeons in the 19th century would zap patients using a galvanic battery that in many cases would restore normal breathing and heartbeat.

In my series, “An Agony of Effort: The True Story of Bloodborne,” I argued that Bloodborne is a massive allegory for the horrific, often bloodsoaked medical research of the 17 and 1800s. The dissection of cadavers plays a central role in this extensive medical metaphor, and From Software uses hunters as a parallel for anatomists of the Georgian and Victorian eras, whereas beasts serve as a parallel for medical patients and, much more commonly, cadavers. We see that relationship play out yet again with the Spark Hunters and with Darkbeast Paarl. According to the Spark Hunter Badge, the Spark Hunters, led by Archibald, were “fascinated with the blue sparks that emanate from the hides of the darkbeasts.” The notion is that these beasts possess some sort of inherent spark, just like the innate “animal electricity” that Galvani and his contemporaries theorized. The Spark Hunter Archibald dedicated his life to recreating these blue sparks of beasts, just like Galvani, Aldini and Ure did with galvanism—applying electricity to dead bodies—in the hopes of healing or reanimating them. Paarl, this dead beast that returns to life with the power of these blue arcing sparks, appears to be a metaphorical representation of the cadaver returned to life with the power of electricity.

If Paarl depicts a corpse reanimated by electricity, what about the Spark Hunters? Who are they? Simple. Because hunters are analogs for the surgeons and anatomists of the 17 and 1800s who carved up cadavers for research, the Spark Hunters are depictions of the real-life medical and biological researchers we’ve just talked about who used galvanism to experiment on cadavers. In Bloodborne, the Spark Hunters are characterized as eccentric figures or heretics whose practices ran counter to those of the Healing Church hunters. To say that the real-life scholars of galvanism were eccentric figures whose experiments were seen as a rebuke of the natural order would be a gross understatement. Although we receive little information about the Spark Hunters, we know they touted their own unique gadgets, primarily the Tonitrus trick weapon and the Tiny Tonitrus hunter tool. One look at a galvanic battery and almost any dramatic reinterpretations of galvanism in popular culture gives us a strong indication where From Software drew inspiration for these items.

Before we close up this episode, have you ever wondered where the name “Paarl” came from? I wish I had a definitive answer, but instead I just have an interesting possibility. Some players have noted that Paarl is a city in South Africa whose name is derived from the Dutch word parel, which means pearl. I think they might be on the right track with South Africa, but I don’t think the pearl connotation is the inspirational spark we’re after. Paarl, South Africa is the seat of the municipal area known as Drakenstein. Could this be a subtle hint connecting Paarl and Frankenstein? We’ll have to brainstorm on it. Thanks for watching.

References

Fairclough, Mary Caroline Louisa. “Frankenstein and Chemistry.” Literature and Medicine. (2019): 269-286.

Finger, Stanley, Marco Piccolino, and Frank W. Stahnisch. “Alexander von Humboldt: Galvanism, Electricity, and Self-Experimentation Part 1: Formative Years, Naturphilosophie, and Galvanism.” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 22 (2013): 225-260.

Green, Thomas. “On Death from Chloroform: Its Prevention by Galvanism.” British Medical Journal 595 (1872): 551-553.

Parent, Andre. “Giovanni Aldini: From Animal Electricity to Human Brain Stimulation.” Historical Neuroscience 31 (2004): 576-584.

Ruston, Sharon. “The Science of Life and Death in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” The Public Domain Review (2015).

Sleigh, Charlotte. “Life, Death and Galvanism.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 28, no. 2 (1998): 219-248.

Bite-Sized Bloodborne #2 - The Blood Saints | Google Docs Link

Of the various members of the Healing Church that we encounter in Bloodborne, it’s the hunters and clerics that take center stage in the gameplay and lore. Our epic confrontations with Amelia, Laurence and Ludwig leave a permanent impression on us. But compared to these prominent characters and even the everyday Church Hunters that we encounter throughout the game, we receive scant information about a supporting segment of the Church: the Blood Saints. In this episode of Bite-Sized Bloodborne, we’ll make the rounds through this often overlooked wing of the Healing Church and examine how the humble Blood Saints play a surprisingly significant role in Bloodborne’s medical metaphor.

What little information we receive about the Blood Saints comes from two items and a small collection of dialogues with two female characters, Adella and Adeline. Understandably, most of the attention that the lore community has paid to the Blood Saints has targeted their role as “vessels” or harborers of special blood. There remains a great deal of uncertainty as to how and why these women have such unique and valuable blood, and there’s a great deal of debate and speculation about how the Church cultivates blood using the Blood Saints. But that’s not particularly important for our understanding of the Blood Saints’ role in the medical metaphor. For that, we can rely on a variety of other small but meaningful details of the Blood Saints and their parent organization.

As its name overtly indicates, the Healing Church was designed by From Software to be a fusion of religion and medicine. It’s an institution with stark Christian overtones and symbols, yet one devoted to the science of healing. We see numerous examples of this dichotomy, perhaps none more clearly than the Church Hunters, who are draped in their priest-like black-and-white garments and holy shawls. But as we saw in Part VI of my series, An Agony of Effort: The True Story of Bloodborne, the increasing complexity in the design of the Church Hunter attire sets mirrors the evolution of medical attire in the 1800s. In real life, as medical and surgical science became more advanced, the attire of doctors and surgeons shifted from all black to all white, just like the basic Church Hunters wear black while the more sophisticated segment of Church Hunters wears white. We see this in the item descriptions, where the Black Church Hunters are called “elementary doctors” who practice a sort of “preventative” medicine, whereas the superior White Church Hunters are called “doctors” and “specialists.”

Recognizing the fundamental dichotomy of religion and medicine in the Healing Church allows us to form a basic idea about what the Blood Saints represent. Because the Blood Saints are subordinate to the doctor-like Church hunters, and because the Blood Saints, we can assume, are all female, there’s reason to believe that these saintly figures were inspired by the real-life nurses of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Although they’re called Blood Saints, these figures, according to the Blood of Adella item, are the nuns of the Healing Church. This detail is small but exceptionally important. While referring to Blood Saints as “nuns” obviously gives them a religious connotation and centers them within the sacred hierarchy of the Healing Church, it ties these characters to the game’s medical metaphor. Monastic nuns and other sisters of religious orders were responsible for creating the nursing profession as we know it today, and for hundreds of years these women of the cloth played a more significant role in caring for the sick and dying than many of the best educated physicians of the time.

Scholars of the history of nursing generally credit the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, a religious order in France, as the originators of the nursing profession. Formed in the early 1600s, the Daughters of Charity were unlike the traditional Catholic nuns who vowed to live a life of poverty and celibacy within a convent. The Daughters of Charity were deemed sisters of a religious order who took individual vows to care for the poor. Their service as religious sisters included receiving instruction in divinity and how to care for the ill and infirm. In the 1800s, the group would establish a number of community hospitals and provide in-home visits to the sick in more than two dozen parishes across France. The popularity of the Daughters of Charity grew rapidly, and over the following decades, pockets of the organization sprang up across Europe, North America and the United Kingdom.

The value of nursing nuns reached its pinnacle in the mid-1800s during armed conflicts on two sides of the Atlantic. During the U.S. Civil War of the 1860s, more than 600 nursing nuns and sisters cared for wounded Union and Confederate soldiers. This came less than a decade after Florence Nightingale, the matriarch of modern nursing, along with her team of several dozen nursing sisters tended to hundreds of wounded British soldiers in Istanbul during the Crimean War.

Nuns were so closely associated with nursing that even in the late 1800s after nursing became a professional trade with no religious affiliation, it was still common to refer to nurses throughout the English-speaking world as “sister.” The title of Sister Adella, a subservient figure to the hunter-doctors of the Healing Church, doesn’t seem like it’s based only on the religious aspects of the character. It seems like a dual reference to her status as a woman of the Church and a metaphor for Victorian-era nurses. It’s also quite possible that the dialogue muttered by the heavily bandaged Huntsman’s Minion enemies, “So cold, dear sister,” is something a pauper or a hospital patient would say to a passing nurse, hoping for aid, comfort or warmth.

As we noted at the start of the episode, the signature aspect of the Blood Saints is their harboring of special blood. Adella and Adeline, a current and a former nun of the Healing Church, give the player-character their blood in an act of charity and gratitude. Why would From Software design the Blood Saints, these nuns of the Healing Church, as figures who do this, who give their own blood to the player-character? This wasn’t by accident.

The nursing nuns and sisters of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries were often providing basic care to the destitute in an act of charity, as the name Daughters of Charity would attest. This might explain why, as Last Protagonist noted in his Japanese retranslations, the Blood Saints in the original Japanese are said to give “alms of blood”—the term “alms” being historically associated with religious-based charitable giving. Numerous works of Renaissance art depict the act of almsgiving by saints, giving money or sustenance to the needy. Aruki Mania also notes in his breakdown of the Blood of Adella that the original Japanese text strongly emphasizes that the Blood of Adella is a “blood offering” given willingly, which separates this item from most other blood consumables in the game. We’re supposed to see the Blood Saints as charitable figures.

But let’s look closer at the act itself. In Christian theology, the giving of one’s blood can be seen as symbolic of Christ’s sacrifice to ensure the spiritual salvation of humanity. But as early as the 14th century, the act of giving one’s blood became a symbol of charity as depicted in the art, bestiaries and architecture of the Medieval and Renaissance eras, primarily taking the form of the pelican, of all things. According to various ancient legends, the pelican was said to spear its own breast with its beak, using its blood either to feed its young during times of scarcity or even to bring its dead chicks back to life. The spilling of its own blood symbolizes self-sacrifice and the power of divine blood in resurrection. But the pelican ultimately became symbolic of the Eucharist, meaning the bread and wine representing the body and blood of Christ that Christians consume in remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice. The Eucharist is consumed as part of the religious act of Communion. As we’ve already noted, in Bloodborne, just like the pelican of Christian iconography, Blood Saints give their own blood to the player-character in an act of charity. Furthermore, the Blood of Adella item description states, “The mere chance of being treated with their blood,” meaning the Blood Saints, “lends legitimacy to the Healing Church and communion.”

While we’ve established that the act of giving one’s blood connects the Blood Saints to a Christian symbol of charity, what does this pelican symbolism have to do with the Blood Saints being a metaphor for nurses? Throughout my series An Agony of Effort: The True Story of Bloodborne, I argued that the Healing Church was based upon the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, one of the leading hospitals of the Victorian era and a pioneering institution of surgery. The Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh Nurse Training School was founded in 1872, and over the course of the next several decades it trained hundreds of women who would go on to accept nursing positions around the world. The training program would eventually become the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh School of Nursing, and beginning in 1917, women who completed their nursing education at the infirmary were given a badge in honor of their achievement. It displays the pelican, feeding her young with her own blood. The pelican also became part of the Royal Infirmary’s coat of arms, the infirmary’s magazine for nurses became known as The Pelican, and the name of the professional organization for nurses there would be called the Pelican Nurses’ League. The Royal Infirmary archives describe the decision to adopt the pelican name and symbol, stating:

“The Pelican is an ancient symbol of charity and sacrifice, and is shown on the badge as sitting on its nest, plucking its breast to feed its young with its own blood, symbolising the nurse’s dedication to the service of others.”

By giving us her own blood, Sister Adella, a nun of the Healing Church, is engaging in an act that for hundreds of years was a symbol of religious charity that later became synonymous with nursing. It’s the perfect fusion of religion and healing that we would expect of the Healing Church. And it’s yet another strong piece of evidence that Bloodborne is telling us a clandestine story about medicine of a bygone era. Thanks for watching.

Addendum: Understandably, it might seem odd that we receive blood from the prostitute Arianna in a similar fashion to the blood alms we receive from the Blood Saints. Does that taint this line of analysis? I don’t believe so, and I think there could be several possible explanations for this. The conflict between Adella and Arianna (which ultimately can lead Adella to murder Arianna in cold blood) helps to solidify the schism between the Healing Church and the Vilebloods. The Church’s blood and thus that of the Blood Saints is viewed as pure and sanctified, whereas the Blood of Arianna—which the game strongly implies comes from the bloodline of Cainhurst—is described as tainted or impure. Beyond these basic narrative explanations, there’s historical context for this as well. Nursing sisters in organizations such as the Daughters of Charity were chosen for their moral fiber and virtue. Women with any history of sexual promiscuity would have been barred from joining these sisterly orders. Meanwhile, monastic nuns—those who cloistered in convents—took vows of celibacy as a condition of their service to God. That Arianna is a prostitute helps further contrast her with the nuns of the Healing Church who, much like the real-life nursing nuns and sisters, would have been chaste and virtuous.

References

Beran, Emily. “The Pelican in Her Piety.” Kenneth Spencer Research Library Blog, 2017. https://blogs.lib.ku.edu/spencer/tag/vulning-pelican/

Caparelli, Jamie Lynn. “Nursing Nuns: A History of Caring—And Changing the Course of Health Care.” American Journal of Nursing, 105, no. 8 (2005): 72.

Dinan, Susan E. Women and Poor Relief in Seventeenth Century France. Ashgate Publishing, 2006.

Nelson, Siabon. Say Little, Do Much: Nursing, Nuns, and Hospitals in the Nineteenth Century. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

Saunders, William. “The Symbolism of the Pelican.” Catholic Education Resource Center, 2003.

Bite-Sized Bloodborne #3 - Weapons of (Medical) War | Google Docs Link

When we begin the game Bloodborne, having undergone a medical procedure in Iosefka’s Clinic, we don’t embark on our quest to hunt the beasts of Yharnam’s Victorian streets equipped with the long rifles and sabres that were the Western weapons of war of the 1800s. Our enemies have them, but we don’t. Instead, we’re given the choice of an ax, a saw or a cane.

But have you ever wondered why? Why did From Software give us these weapons at the beginning of the game? And why was the Saw Cleaver chosen as the signature item for this title, appearing on the game’s cover and in its opening cinematic? In this episode of Bite-Sized Bloodborne, we’ll peruse the game’s weaponry and see how the armaments of Bloodborne are an important slice of the game’s medical narrative.

In our initial visit to the Hunter’s Dream, we’re able to choose a supporting firearm and one of three primary weapons: the Hunter’s Axe, the Saw Cleaver or the Threaded Cane. Because these are the first weapons we’re able to obtain in the game, and because for many players they’ll become the main if not only weapon they’ll use during their first playthrough, it’s worth exploring why From Software decided to give us these particular implements. Obviously, axes have been used in civilizations around the world, including in battle, and they’re present in countless fantasy role playing and adventure games. But that’s not the case with the Saw Cleaver and the Threaded Cane. In terms of real-life weaponry—be it of the Victorian era or before—saws and canes weren’t used on the battlefield. So what gives? Did From Software decide to feature these weapons simply because they thought they looked cool? I think there was a lot more thoughtfulness and intentionality than that. For us to understand why these items are so conspicuous in Bloodborne, we have to look once again to the game’s medical metaphor.

As I argued throughout my series, An Agony of Effort: The True Story of Bloodborne, Bloodborne is a massive allegory for the evolution of medical science and practice in 17 and 1800s Great Britain. From Software uses hunters as a metaphor for the surgeons and anatomists of the period, while beasts are a metaphor for surgical patients and cadavers. When we keep in mind these prerequisites, Fromsoft’s decision to include a saw and a cane among the game’s introductory weapons seems very clever, intentional and appropriate. To see why that’s the case, we need to study how these items were used in the real world of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Our inspection of the Saw Cleaver has to begin with a historical review of the bloody operating rooms of yesteryear. Surgery in the Georgian and Victorian eras is almost unimaginable when viewed against today’s standards. Until the very late 1800s, surgery was often a last resort, undertaken with the clear understanding that the process would be unbelievably painful and likely to result in the patient’s death from either blood loss or sepsis. Moreover, prior to anesthesia and sanitary surgical techniques that came about in the mid-19th century, physicians had few legitimate options at their disposal when it came to surgical interventions. Operating on the internal organs was a rare undertaking because it was a virtual death sentence for the patient. And because precision internal surgeries were beyond physicians’ abilities and available technology of the time, the most common surgical procedure of the 18th and 19th centuries was amputation.

Amputation was the inevitable resolution to any number of injuries, war wounds and physical maladies for centuries. Compound and comminuted fractures of arms and legs, often caused by crushing injuries, meant the loss of a forearm or lower leg. The same went for appendages afflicted with gangrene or severe blood clots. The procedure could be chaotic, often requiring three or four men to hold down the patient while the physician first used a knife to cut through the soft tissues and expose the joint or the broken bone. From there, he would employ a different tool to finish the job: a bone saw.

Because amputations were by far the most frequently performed operations of the 17 and 1800s, physicians in Great Britain and North America earned an unflattering but appropriate nickname: sawbones. The sawbones moniker might have been used as early as the 1680s, but it was part of common parlance in the 1800s, even appearing in popular literature including R.L. Stevenson’s “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” in 1886 and Charles Dickens’ “Pickwick Papers” in 1836. “Old Sawbones” was also the slang term for military surgeons during the U.S. Civil War who are believed to have performed more than 60,000 amputations. A battlefield doctor of the mid-1800s, much like their predecessors in the prior century, didn’t need to be a masterful artist to remove a tattered arm or leg. They simply needed a strong constitution, a curved knife and a bone saw, items that were more like craftsmen’s tools than precision instruments. This might very well be why the early hunters of Bloodborne operated out of the Hunters Workshop, a term much more commonly associated with woodworking. Much like a craftsman uses a saw to cut wood, the hunters used saws to cut down beasts and surgeons used saws to cut through bone. It makes perfect sense that the most primitive weapons of Bloodborne, those of the Old Hunters, are similar to the primitive operating tools of old surgeons. The Cleaver, equipped with saw-like teeth and almost completely covered with medical bandages, is inspired by the bone saws that early surgeons used. It’s a massive clue dropped into the beginning of the game to help establish the medical metaphor. We later come to learn that the Old Hunters mused that beast blood crept up through the leg. This, we’re told, is why the hunters took certain precautions with their attire, including the tightly tied belts just like the tourniquets that would have been used during real-life amputations of lower legs. It’s no coincidence—none whatsoever—that Gehrman is missing a lower leg; it’s an immediate signal to us that his leg has been amputated. It’s the single most distinctive feature of arguably Bloodborne’s main character. It’s a flashing red light to help us identify the game’s medical metaphor. If you think I’m reading too much into this, then tell me why there’s a drawer full of antique bone saws at the foot of the workshop in the Hunter’s Dream. The medical references are everywhere in this room.

If beast hunting is a metaphor for surgery and dissection, as I’ve argued, then the description of the Saw Cleaver—and that of the Saw Spear—only underscores this idea. It states, “The saw, with its set of blood-letting teeth, has become a symbol of the hunt.” Just like a bone saw is symbolic of amputation, the Saw Cleaver and Saw Spear are symbolic of the hunt.

While the saw-like weapons that we obtain are easier to connect to Victorian medicine, they aren’t the only ones inspired by surgical implements. A weapon we obtain in the DLC, the Beast Cutter, might be even more overt in its surgical imagery and diction. This item, used by the oldest cadre of hunters, “slices through the toughest of beast hides.” If we swap out just a couple of words in the Beast Cutter’s item description, the surgical imagery leaps off the page. “This crude [implement] relies on brute force and is regrettably inelegant, suggesting that the [operations] of the earliest [surgeons] made for horrific affairs, painted in sanguine blacks and reds.” It’s almost impossible to see this as anything other than a reference to early surgery and amputation.

Another of the Old Hunter weapons of the DLC, the Beasthunter Saif, with its uniquely curved blade, appears to be inspired by the curved blades used in the 18th century to cut through flesh as the first step of an amputation, prior to sawing the bone. The item description even seems to allude to this order of operations, as this curved blade “was later replaced by saws.” The curved blade came first, followed by the saw, just as in an amputation.

The evidence indicates that From Software designed the Saw Cleaver with an eye on the bone saws of early surgeons. By featuring this item so prominently in the opening cinematic, on the game’s cover and as one of the first three weapons available to players, game designers were giving us a massive hint about the central medical metaphor of Bloodborne.

It’s certainly reasonable to assume that the Threaded Cane, like countless other items and features in the game, is a contextual device. Just like the horse-drawn carriages, the Georgian architecture and the antique firearms—all of which nest the game in the 17 and 1800s—the cane could be one of many scene-setting weapons, items or environmental pieces. But there’s much more to it than that.

While it’s true that the cane was a popular accessory for wealthy gentlemen of Victorian England, it didn’t just pop up overnight. We have to understand the historical origin of this phenomenon. Nearly 400 years ago, a specific group within Britain’s elite began to carry the cane as a status symbol: it was physicians. The trend began in France, where men of the more scholarly trades stopped carrying a sword and instead touted the handheld cane to signify masculinity and intellectual sophistication. In Great Britain, however, the cane was synonymous with the physician, much like today the white coat or stethoscope is symbolic of the profession.

As the Royal College of Physicians of London noted in a 2014 article, “From at least the beginning of the 17th century to the end of the 19th, physicians were thought of as inseparable from another accoutrement: their canes.” Nineteenth century author John Cordy Jeaffreson described the ubiquity of canes within the medical profession of the 16 and 1700s. In his 1861 publication, “A Book About Doctors,” Jeaffreson writes, “No doctor of medicine presumed to pay a professional visit, or even to be seen in public, without this mystic wand…..It was an instrument with which…every prudent aspirant to medical practice was provided” (1861, 2).

Although the cane was largely symbolic of intellectualism and later medicine, it wasn’t without its practical applications. Canes were often crafted with a hollow shaft or a small compartment at the handle, which commonly held pungent vinegar or a cordial that a physician could inhale or drink in the hopes it would protect him from contracting whatever illness was plaguing his patient. Because many early doctors were quacks who touted bogus cures for any number of ailments, the cane-sniffing physician was lampooned in the satirical etchings of 18th century artists, including Thomas Rowlandson and William Hogarth.

While canes were emblematic of 1700s medicine, they were previously employed by a special segment of the medical fraternity of the 16th century: the plague doctors. These physicians who treated the sick in the larger cities of Europe during outbreaks of bubonic plague carried short wands or canes that allowed them to poke and prod patients without making direct contact. Much like later doctors did with aromatics hidden in the compartments of their canes, plague doctors stuffed their beak-like masks with herbs to help filter miasmic air that was believed to carry disease. As many others have pointed out, the Crowfeather attire set, with its beaked mask, is almost certainly a reference to these plague doctors of yore. The medical references in this game truly are inescapable.

By exposing the real-life inspirations for the Saw Cleaver, the Threaded Cane and several other weapons wielded by the Old Hunters, we’re able to see how these figures fit into the game’s medical metaphor. The Old Hunters represent early surgeons—those who performed the most basic and brutal operations. In the Bloodborne universe, the Old Hunters eventually gave way to the hunters of the Healing Church, who are explicitly called doctors and represent the physicians of later eras, practicing internal surgery and using medicinal agents for experimentation and research.

This is what I mean when I say that Bloodborne is an allegory for the evolution of medical science and practice in the 17 and 1800s. The medical metaphor is real. We just have to open our minds to it. Thanks for watching.

References

Bishop, W. J. “Notes on the History of Medical Costume.” Annals of Medical History 6, no. 3 (1934): 193-218.

Brown, Michael. “Redeeming Mr. Sawbone: Compassion and Care in the Cultures of Nineteenth-Century Surgery.” Journal of Compassionate Health Care 4, no. 13 (2017): 1-7.

Higgitt, Rebekah. “How to Spot a Doctor Before the Invention of the Stethoscope.” The Guardian, February 25, 2016.

Gibbs, Denis. “When a Cane Was the Necessary Complement of a Physician.” Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of London 33, no. 1 (1999): 85-89.

Jeaffreson, John Cordy. A Book About Doctors. New York: Rudd & Carleton, 1861.

“Physician’s Cane.” Scientific American 30, no. 6 (1874): 86.

Royal College of Physicians of London. “A Physician’s Cane and the Secrets It Contained.” (2014). https://history.rcplondon.ac.uk/blog/physicians-cane-and-secrets-it-contained

Wangensteen, Owen H., Jacqueline Smith and Sarah Wangensteen. “Some Highlights in the History of Amputation: Reflecting Lessons in Wound Healing.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 41, no. 2 (1967): 97-131.