How a dying Pope’s desperate “treatment” became the blueprint for how power justifies the use of human bodies in the modern age.
The Death Of Pope Innocent VIII
The year is 1492. In the Vatican’s private chambers, Pope Innocent VIII lies dying. His physicians, desperate to save the most powerful religious figure in Europe, make a decision that reveals something fundamental about how authority views the vulnerable.
Three young boys are escorted into the chamber. One by one they bleed them.
To death.
The children’s blood, still warm, still carrying their life force, is fed to the dying pontiff. Not as a last resort born of ignorance, but as a calculated medical intervention.
The Pope dies anyway.
But here’s the question that should haunt us: How did the physicians decide which bodies were expendable?
If you were one of the physicians, on what basis would you have chosen which boys to bleed? Their health? Their poverty? Their obscurity? The calculation had to be made. Someone had to look at children and see not people, but potential transfusions.
How would you have made that choice?
Picture it: The Vatican’s private chambers, 1492. Three boys stand in flickering candlelight, perhaps told they’re there to help save God’s representative on Earth. The physicians don’t explain what “help” means.
They make the incisions.
The boys’ confusion turns to terror, then to silence. The Pope’s attendants hold golden chalices beneath the wounds. No one in the room questions the logic. It’s already been accepted, these bodies are available because powerful men need them to be.
No additional reasons necessary.
The equation remains unchanged in the modern age, their desire justifies our extraction. Our only progress has been in the art of justification.
The Arithmetic of Disposability
When you hold absolute power, certain calculations become possible.
One Pope = three boys.
This wasn’t an equation they had to justify to anyone. The boys weren’t from noble families. They weren’t wealthy. They likely weren’t even named in the historical records that documented the Pope’s final days. They existed in the ledger of history only as their function: blood sources.
This is how power has always worked. Not through grand declarations of superiority, but through quiet arithmetic that determines whose body is a person and whose body is a resource.
The Pope Innocent VIII incident wasn’t an aberration. It was clarity, a moment when the veil slipped and revealed the underlying logic that the powerful have always operated by:
Your body belongs to you only as long as someone more powerful doesn’t need it.
The Cathedral of Consent: How We Launder Exploitation
Here’s what separates us from those Vatican physicians: we’ve built a cathedral around the same transaction.
We’ve added stained-glass windows of “Choice” and “Opportunity” gazing beautifully down. We’ve installed an ethics committee as the choir. We’ve written consent forms as our scriptures. But the altar still demands the same sacrifice, vulnerable bodies to feed the needs of powerful interests.
This is bioethical laundering: the process of taking what is clearly exploitation and running it through enough institutional mechanisms that it emerges looking like progress, medicine, or freedom.
Here’s how it works:
Step 1: Identify the practice. Something obviously wrong, like harvesting organs from executed prisoners, or medical experiments on enslaved people.
Step 2: Add regulatory oversight. Ethics review boards. Consent documentation. Payment structures. Medical justifications. Legal frameworks.
Step 3: Rebrand. It’s not exploitation anymore. Now it’s:
Voluntary participation
Medical advancement
Economic opportunity
Personal choice
Scientific progress
Step 4: Defend it using the modern language of exploitation. Anyone who questions it gets accused of being anti-science, paternalistic, or standing in the way of people’s “choices.”
The transfer of bodily resources from the powerless to the powerful continues unchanged. We’ve just made it defendable.
A Monday morning in Phoenix, 2024. The plasma donation center opens at 6 AM. By 6:15, twenty-three people are in the waiting room. Almost all are under thirty. Most haven’t eaten breakfast, the payment matters more than the dizziness afterward.
A man checks in for his second donation this week. The receptionist scans his arm for viable veins, notes his weight, asks him to initial the consent form. He doesn’t read it. He’s a veteran on his sixty-third donation.
The extracted plasma will be processed into immunoglobulin treatments that cost $10,000 per dose. He’ll receive $50. In the back room, the centrifuges hum. The transaction is clean, legal, voluntary.
No one relates it back to the horrors committed by those Vatican physicians. But the equation remains the same, one body’s depletion for another body’s enhancement.
The only difference is the amount of paperwork necessary to make it “legal.”
The Illusion of Consent: The Cathedral’s Most Sacred Tool
“But they consented”
It’s the excuse given in defense of every modern example.
“They chose to donate plasma, sell eggs, participate in trials.”
Did they?
Or do we live in a society that engineers conditions where selling your body, your blood, your reproductive capacity, your health, becomes the only rational economic decision remaining, then we call the resulting transaction “voluntary”?
When someone faces eviction and a plasma center offers $400/month, that’s not consent.
That’s coercion with paperwork.
The Pope’s physicians didn’t ask those boys for permission. We’ve evolved to the point where we create conditions that manufacture consent. It’s more sophisticated. But here’s what we need to sit with:
Is engineered consent actually different from no consent? Or have we just gotten better at making exploitation look like opportunity?
When you fill a prescription, have you ever asked yourself who bore the initial risk to make that drug safe for you?
Probably not.
What kind of desperation made that risk worth taking for them? Their signature on a consent form, does that change what happened to their body?
Definitely not.
The Long History of Bodies as Resources
Let’s trace this logic through history, because it didn’t die in 1492. It just learned to fill out forms.
The Transatlantic Slave Trade (1500s-1800s)
The slave trade wasn’t just labor extraction, it redefined millions of bodies as property by law. Not people who could be enslaved, but bodies that were, by definition, available resources.
Medical experimentation without meaningful consent:
J. Marion Sims (1840s): Performed experimental gynecological surgeries on enslaved women without anesthesia. He’s called the “father of modern gynecology.” The women whose bodies he cut into aren’t called anything, we don’t know most of their names.
Tuskegee Syphilis Study (1932-1972): 600 Black men, told they were receiving free healthcare, were deliberately left untreated for syphilis so doctors could study disease progression. For forty years.
Henrietta Lacks (1951): Her cervical cancer cells, taken without consent during treatment, became the HeLa cell line, one of the most important tools in medicine, worth billions. All while her family couldn’t afford health insurance.
Forced sterilization programs (1900s-1970s): Over 60,000 people forcibly sterilized in the U.S. alone. Targets: Indigenous women, Black women, disabled people, the incarcerated, the poor. Not ancient history, California was still doing it in state prisons into the 2000s.
Each of these had their own justifications.
Scientific progress. Public health. Medical necessity. Social benefit.
The pattern is consistent across centuries: when power needs something from bodies, it redefines whose bodies are available for harvest, then builds a justification structure around the practice.
The Modern Pharmaceutical Complex: Same Logic, Better Paperwork
You don’t have to look to history.
The same logic is operational right now.
Clinical trials disproportionately recruit from the economically desperate, poor communities, incarcerated people, populations in countries with less regulatory oversight.
They’re testing drugs that will be priced far beyond the reach of the people who bore the risk of testing them. They signed consent forms. Because they needed the $1,000 participation payment to avoid eviction, or to stop the repo man from repossession of their only form of transportation.
Plasma donation centers cluster in poor neighborhoods like payday lenders. Regular donors, selling their blood plasma twice a week for $50-80, are overwhelmingly people in financial crisis.
The plasma gets processed into treatments that cost thousands per dose. Who’s selling their literal bodily fluids to survive? Who’s buying the refined products? The answer is in the demographics of any plasma center’s waiting room.
The surrogacy industry increasingly operates across borders, wealthy couples from developed nations hiring women in India, Ukraine, Thailand to carry their children.
The women are paid a fraction of what agencies charge. Their bodies, their gestational capacity, their health risks, become the service being purchased. When complications arise, whose health gets prioritized? Check the contracts.
It’s not the women. Once again, the poor are expendable.
Egg donation from young women, often college students desperate for tuition money, undergo hormone treatments and surgical procedures with risks they’re rarely fully informed about.
Agencies market their eggs to wealthy families for $50,000-100,000. Donors receive $5,000-10,000 and assume all medical risk, including potential long-term fertility impacts still not fully understood.
The Question We’re Not Supposed to Ask
Here’s what makes people uncomfortable:
Is this fundamentally different from bleeding those boys in 1492?
The structure is identical:
1. Powerful person needs something from a body
2. Less powerful person has the body but needs resources
3. Transaction is framed as voluntary/medical/legal
4. Risk and harm stays with the vulnerable body
5. Benefit flows to the powerful person
6. System is defended as progress
We’ve made it cleaner. More bureaucratic. We’ve added consent forms and ethics committees.
But the underlying logic, your body becomes available as a resource when you lack the power to refuse, remains unchanged.
The only difference is now we’ve built institutional structures that let us feel good about it.
Who Decides Which Bodies Are Disposable?
The pattern across history is clear: the people whose bodies become resources are never the ones making the rules about which bodies can be used.
Medical ethics boards approving research don’t come from the communities being researched. Pharmaceutical executives profiting from plasma don’t donate twice weekly. Wealthy couples hiring surrogates aren’t offering their own bodies. Politicians defending prison labor aren’t working for $0.23/hour.
This isn’t coincidental. It’s structural.
The system is designed so that people with power to decide which bodies are available never have to include their own bodies in that category.
Think about every institutional decision about whose bodies are exposed to risk:
Which communities get located near toxic waste facilities?
Whose water gets contaminated for industrial profit?
Which populations become test subjects for untested drugs?
Which workers are exposed to carcinogens for poverty wages?
Whose neighborhoods become sacrifice zones for economic development?
The people making these decisions live elsewhere. Drink different water. Work different jobs.
That’s not an accident. That’s the mechanism that allows the system to continue.
What This Reveals About Power
The most chilling aspect of the Pope Innocent VIII story isn’t the blood-drinking itself.
It’s how unremarkable the decision was to his physicians.
They didn’t agonize. They didn’t convene ethics committees. They didn’t document their moral reasoning. They simply calculated: three young lives of no importance versus one powerful life.
The math was easy. It always is.
That ease is what we should pay attention to.
Because that same ease is visible today in every decision about whose bodies are available. The bureaucrats, executives, and policymakers making these decisions aren’t cackling villains. They’re professionals who’ve simply internalized the same logic as those Vatican physicians:
Some bodies matter more than others. Some bodies are people. Some bodies are resources. The difference is determined by power.
And when you’ve built enough institutional structures around that logic, consent forms, ethics boards, regulatory frameworks, payment systems, it stops looking like exploitation and starts looking like the way things work.
The Bodies Are Still Being Bled
We like to think we’ve evolved beyond the barbarity of 1492.
We have consent forms now. Ethics committees. Regulatory oversight. Payment structures. We don’t bleed children to save Popes. (At least, that’s what we’re told. But I have no doubt they would abandon those constraints without a second thought if it served their needs)
But strip away the bureaucracy and ask: Whose bodies are being used to extend, enhance, and enrich the lives of the powerful?
The plasma seller donating twice weekly while pharmaceutical companies report record profits?
The woman in Mumbai carrying a child for a couple in California?
The prisoner manufacturing products for corporations at $0.25/hour?
The clinical trial participant in a developing nation testing drugs they’ll never afford?
The coal miner developing black lung so executives can profit?
The Amazon warehouse worker pissing in bottles to meet quotas while Bezos builds rockets?
Each of these has something the Vatican physicians didn’t have, consent forms. They’ve covered up their evil by making it so common most never notice.
Does that change what’s happening? Or does it just make us feel better about it?
The Final Question
The Pope died anyway.
The boys died for nothing.
But the logic that made their deaths possible, the arithmetic that calculated three young lives as an acceptable cost for attempting to save one powerful life, that logic didn’t die with them.
It’s alive and operational in every system that treats vulnerable bodies as available resources.
We’ve just built our Cathedral of Consent around it. The walls are so high now we can no longer hear the children scream as they bleed.
But they bleed just the same.
So here is the final question, the one that echoes from 1492 into every plasma center and surrogacy contract today:
If those Vatican physicians were monsters for bleeding three boys to save a Pope, what does that make a system that bleeds millions of vulnerable bodies, more slowly, more legally, more bureaucratically, to maintain the comfort, health, and wealth of the powerful?
They’ve made it cleaner.
They’ve made it legal.
They’ve made it voluntary under conditions they themselves engineered.
But have they actually changed the fundamental relationship between power and bodies?
Or have they just gotten better at hiding what they’re doing behind the language of consent, choice, and medical advancement?
The boys bled in 1492, are simply known as “the boys,” history didn’t find them important enough to record their names. The vulnerable bodies being used as resources today are just as unimportant. That’s not an accident. That’s the system working exactly as designed.
The walls of our Cathedral of Consent are beautifully constructed. The stained glass depicts Choice, Opportunity and Progress. But if you listen carefully, you can still hear the same transaction taking place at the altar.
The only question left is what we, who now see the equation, intend to do about it.