History of Porphyria

 A Little Bit of History

1841 The term 'porphyrin' comes from the Greek word, porphyus, meaning reddish-purple. It was first thought that the reddish color of blood was from iron. One early scientist performed an experiment to prove that this was not the case. He washed dried blood with concentrated sulfuric acid to free the iron. He then treated it with alcohol and the resulting iron free residue took on a reddish purple color though it contained no iron compound

Vampires and Garlic

Halloween.  That yearly tradition of kids dressing up as their favorite character all in order to gather copious amounts of candy from total strangers while their parents pull a wagon full of adult beverages.

We have a tradition of going over to some friends neighborhood that contains a lot more kids than our neighborhood and pull said wagon.   It is always a blast to see the costumes that the kids come up with – witches, werewolves, angry birds, and the assorted super hero.  Zombies also appear to be the “hot” character this year.  Every now and then you would see the classic vampire get up and that got me thinking about the whole vampires and garlic thing.  I mean why no garlic love from the Nosferatu?

Vampire myths originated with a real blood disorder

The concept of a vampire predates Bram Stoker's tales of Count Dracula—probably by several centuries. But did vampires ever really exist?

In 1819, 80 years before the publication of Dracula, John Polidori, an Anglo-Italian physician, published a novel called The Vampire. Stoker's novel, however, became the benchmark for our descriptions of vampires. But how and where did this concept develop? It appears that the folklore surrounding the vampire phenomenon originated in that Balkan area where Stoker located his tale of Count Dracula.

Fact or Fiction: Are Vampires Real?

Raise the stakes with this all encompassing guide on all things vampires.

Author: Leah Hall, for Country Living

It's not your imagination: Vampires are everywhere. They're in vampire movies (hello, Interview with the Vampire) and all over television (we see you, The Vampire Diaries). They're the subject of countless books. (Twilight may have spawned a million vampiric copy cats, but if you want to get good and scared, try a classic: Stephen King's Salem's Lot.)

Vampires and Biochemistry

Perhaps you are a fan of Twilight the movie or the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer, or True Blood the television drama series created and produced by Alan Ball, based on The Southern Vampire Mysteries series of novels by Charlaine Harris. Vampires with their frightening appearance and unusual powers and weaknesses can cause one to pause and question how this is possible. Can this mythicalogical being brought to life in Dracula, the 1897 novel by Irish author Bram Stoker, featuring as its primary antagonist the vampire Count Dracula, have any basis in reality? Is there any connection to what we know about biological systems that could explain vampirism? I doubt that you would be surprised if I said yes, since this is a biochemistry course website.

Scientific Reasons to Believe in Vampires, Werewolves & Zombies

Let's take a look at some of the real-world events and phenomena that may have inspired the creation of vampires, werewolves and zombies.

Porphyria and Types of Porphyria

Porphyrins are a group of chemical compounds that occur in most living cells in both animals and plants. These organic compounds are combined with metals such as magnesium in the plant kingdom to produce chlorophyll and with iron in the animal kingdom to produce heme. They are involved in the control of the electron transport systems of the organism and are localized in the intracellular organelles called mitochondria.

Diseases Sometimes Confused with Vampirism

Over the years, some diseases have sometimes been linked with vampirism because they gave out one or more symptoms that have also been associated with vampires. Those symptoms sometimes confused the person suffering from them and, if that person was already inclined to believe in vampires, even made the possibility of awakening seem plausible. Also, some of these diseases seem to be common among real-life vampires.

Youth Vampire Culture: From the Darkness Toward the Light

As a growing number of youths in America begin to challenge the notion of inequality and repression, they are turning their heads away from the darkness of society's constraints and toward the light of the freedom of a vampire lifestyle. Vampires today symbolize power and life for many youth, including Asian Americans.

The idea of what is a vampire has changed across time. As legend has it, vampires are creatures of the night, damned for eternity to feed on the blood of the living for survival, feared and hated by the world. If this is the legend of vampire, how did their image change over the years? To understand the evolution of vampires, you must first look at its very beginnings.

Werewolves: Legends, Cases, Theories

The wereanimal belief or legend is universal. In the European and American cultures, the predominant theme is that the werecreature is a wolf. In other cultures, there are were- panthers, werejaguars and werebears. Some societies believed that the person shape shifted and appeared to be the animal while others believed the person became the animal.

During the Middle Ages, people in Europe believed in werewolves. Some believed the creature was a wolf whose body was possessed by a demon. Others believed the devil put the person in a trance and transported the soul into a wolf’s body. Another theory was that a demon got into a wolf’s body and charmed the person into believing that he or she committed savage acts that were revealed in dreams. Another theory believed that the person actually changed into a wolf and that the devil substituted a human form in the werewolf’s place.

Werewolf and Vampire!

FRIGHTENING!

If you haven’t been clawed, drained, ripped, bitten or sucked yet, don’t go off guard. I interviewed vampire buffs, visited graveyards, consulted skeptics, and searched the literature.

The truth that I dug up is as frightening as the fiction. Savage attacks by putrid vampires and howling werewolves still occur.

Hunger For the Marvelous: The Vampire Craze in the Computer Age

This summer may have been the season of bats and Batman, but the rest of the year belongs to the vampire. If pop culture's current preoccupation forecasts what to expect from the '90s, we're in for a lively time.

Little did anyone know when Anne Rice first published Interview with the Vampire in 1976 that it would grow into a trilogy (The Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned) that has sold millions. Or that it would spawn an invasion of the undead and raise some interesting questions about why the computer generation has such a fascination with getting its bytes the old-fashioned way.

Vampirism: A Medical Perspective

Vampires have continued to fascinate us and stimulate our imaginations for thousands of years. Indeed, many humans have been accused of being vampires over the centuries due to the fact that their physical characteristics resembled the traits of these blood-sucking monsters. However, modern science has since shed some light on the vampire myth, highlighting three medical conditions that may well explain why some unfortunate souls were mistaken for these dark creatures of the night.

Werewolves - A Medical Perspective

The werewolf has played an important part in universal folklore since pre-Christian times. A werewolf is classically defined as "a person that shape shifts into a wolf without losing the capacity to think as a human." Science has attempted to explain the rationale behind the myth by highlighting a number of diseases that have over the centuries contributed to the werewolf legend:

Coffin Medicine

New research explodes the bloody myths of vampirism

Scary tales about vampires and werewolves continue to be a lucrative Hollywood staple. The evil bloodsuckers who slept in caskets, hid from sunlight, and feared crosses and garlic, have experienced a movie renaissance with the recent sawtooth cinema of Blade and John Carpenter's Vampires, while the premise of hairy, lupine creatures baying at a full moon resulted in the Christmas 1997 release of An American Werewolf in Paris.

Porphyria and Lycanthropy

The disease porphyria may have led to accusations of lycanthropy or vampirism.

Vampires: Eternal Bloodlust

Everybody knows vampires, those immortal creatures that drink the blood of their victims. Hollywood is especially fond of them -- there are probably as many vampire pictures as there are gangster movies. In fact, it's mostly through this medium that they've gained their popularity.

With the new vampire flick Eternal coming out soon, interest in the genre is expected to shoot up again. Let's get prepped by exploring the mythical world of vampires from a scientific, historical and sociological standpoint.

Some info:

Let's start with what most of us know of the vampire myth.

Vampires: A Medical Explanation

As the 20th century evolved, rational man turned to science to explain mythology that had pervaded for thousands of years. How could a man be mistaken for a vampire? How could someone appear to have been the victim of a vampire attack? Science, in time, came back with answers that may surprise you.

Deconstructing the Myths of Vampire Folklore and Examining the Truths of Modern Day Vampires

Why do we, as humans, have a long standing fascination with vampires? Is it our own morbid love affair with death? Or perhaps the twisted psyche of the unknown afterlife which has incarnated into this hideous, Earthly creature? It may be impossible to ever say. There is one thing for certain, however, and that is this: vampires have always, and will always, continue to emerge in various forms throughout history. They have already been with us for many generations, through a myriad ghoulish lore.

The Werewolf Syndrome: Compulsive Bestial Slaughterers

Attack

In 1995, a young woman in Douglas County, Washington, was unable to get her mother or fourteen-year-old sister, Amanda, to answer the phone. That was unusual, so she went to check on them. The front door was locked, so she went around to a sliding rear door that was always unlocked. Inside the home, she found their bodies. One was in a bedroom and one in the family room, both smeared in a great deal of blood. She ran to a neighbor, who called for help. The responding police officers observed that the victims of this grotesque double homicide had been sexually mutilated in a variety of ways by someone who seemed more animal than human.