Blood squirt

Blood squirt (blood spurt, blood spray, blood gush, or blood jet) is the effect when an artery, a blood vessel in the human body (or other organism's body) is cut. Blood pressure causes the blood to bleed out at a rapid, intermittent rate, in a spray, squirt, gush or jet, coinciding with the beating of the heart, rather than the slower, but steady flow of venous bleeding. Also known as arterial bleeding, arterial spurting, or arterial gushing, the amount of blood loss can be copious, occur very rapidly, and can lead to death.

Anatomy

In cut carotid arteries with 100 mL of blood through the heart at each beat (at 65 beats a minute), a completely severed artery will spurt blood for about 30 seconds and the blood will not spurt much higher than the human head. If the artery is just nicked, on the other hand, the blood will spurt longer but will be coming out under pressure and spraying much further.

To prevent hand ischemia, there is a "squirt test" that involves squirting blood from the radial artery, which is used in intraoperative assessment of collateral arm blood flow before radial artery harvest.

Jet of Blood

Jet of Blood (Jet de Sang), also known as Spurt of Blood, is an extremely short play by the French theatre practitioner, Antonin Artaud, who was also the founder of the "Theatre of Cruelty" movement. Jet of Blood was completed in Paris, on January 17, 1925, perhaps in its entirety on that day alone. The original title was Jet de Sang ou la Boule de Verre, but the second half of the title was dropped prior to the first publication and production of the work.

Characters

Synopsis

Jet of Blood is roughly four pages long. It has sparse dialogue and extensive, surreal stage directions. The following synopsis is based on the English translations by George E. Wellwarth and Ruby Cohn (for the original text see Artaud's Oeuvres Completes d'Antonin Artaud vol. 1, pp. 74-81):

The play begins with no description of the scene or stage directions. The characters Young Man and Young Girl repeat the lines, “I love you and everything is beautiful”, “You love me and everything is beautiful,” to one another a couple of times in different, exaggerated tones of voice. After the Young Man declares that the world is beautifully built and well ordered, a sudden violent, chaotic spectacle ensues on stage. This includes a hurricane which separates the Young Man and Young Girl, two stars colliding, assorted things falling from the sky including temples, colonnades, alembics, live pieces of human bodies, three scorpions, a frog, and a beetle which fall slower and slower as they near the ground. The Young Man and Young woman run away, frightened.