BIBLICAL ALLUSIONS TO CLOTTING

To the Editor:  —The extraordinary increase in recent years of coronary thrombosis and other thromboembolic episodes together with the recent discovery that many important drugs employed in medical practice have the undesirable property of accelerating the clotting time of blood—a subject in which I have been a pioneer—aroused an interest in the history of blood coagulation and of clotting in general. I recently published in the Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association (March 1951) a paper on Shakespeare's references to clotting and blood-clotting drugs which received a great deal of comment. I thought it worth while, therefore, to write a few remarks on the allusions to clotting in the Bible. While there are no references to clotting phenomena in the New Testament, in the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, there are three passages of scientific interest. In these passages, the Hebrew word quapha, meaning to clot or curdle or congeal,