The podcast 'Drawing Blood,' planned and co-hosted by Birkbeck College's Christine Slobogin and the Courtauld Institute's Emma Merkling, aims to ask stimulating questions and open up discussions about the intersections between visual culture and histories of death, medicine, surgery, the body, and related areas such as spiritualism and the occult. The podcast explores topics ranging from Victorian protoplasm photographs to medieval paintings of surgeon-saints Cosmas and Damian. The following questions have inspired the desire to create this podcast: Why are humans so fascinated by morbidity? What are some of the feelings we have surrounding the body and its permeability, and why do we feel them? What can histories of death, illness, and the body tell us about other aspects of culture, like literature and art, what it means to be human, and vice versa? How do different cultures deal with these questions and emotions, both in the present and the past?