19th-century New Yorkers drank blood straight from the slaughterhouse. And it’s not as archaic a practice as we like to think. Every day in the 1870s, dozens of New Yorkers visited the city’s slaughterhouses, especially one on 34th street by the Hudson River, not for sides of beef for their dinner tables, but instead for cups of blood, collected straight from the necks of freshly slaughtered steers. Rich and poor alike — but predominately women — they then drank it on the spot, straight and hot. These weren’t the era’s head-to-hoof foodies or thrill-seekers. They were mostly sickly folk who reportedly believed fresh blood contained a vital essence, which would fade if it rested too long, grew cold and congealed. The blood, they thought, could “nourish and sustain their own exhausted vitality,” as a writer for the New York Herald observed of the practice in 1877. Specifically, they believed blood had the power to treat everything from consumption to bone diseases to physical disabilities. | 