SEEKONK, Mass. Jerry Naushon ran up what he calls “ginormous” credit card bills in the months before Christmas, so you might not expect him to be in a giving mood as the year winds down. “That’s not my style,” he tells this reporter as he rolls up his sleeve in a mobile medical van. “If any of my precious bodily fluids can help a person in need, I’m happy to share them.”
But Naushon isn’t about to give blood, one of the four substances that made up the foundation of medicine until the “humoral” theory was debunked in the 17th century. Instead, he will be donating bile, which in either yellow or black forms completed the quartet of humors along with phlegm, the substance that blocks stuffy noses.
“Bile has not been given its due,” says Dr. Floyd Cain of the UMass-Seekonk School of Medicine. “It is essential to a well-balanced personality, otherwise we’d all go around like morning TV talk show hosts on steroids.”
Bile supplies are in high demand following the Christmas holidays, when hyper-active greetings of “Merry Christmas or Kwanzaa/Chappy Chanukah!” ring down office hallways and other public venues between people who have no use for each other in the remaining eleven months of the year. “With a proper dosage of bile, you can convert someone who’s on a ‘Christmas high’ into a productive worker again, just in time to meet first fiscal quarter revenue goals,” says Morton Richardson of the Association of American Industries. “Scrooge gets a bad rap, eventually Bob Cratchit has to get his ass back to work.”
Naushon and others like him say they don’t get the glory that blood donors are showered with, but he’s not upset since the characteristics that yellow bile is associated with are bitterness and a short-temper. “Take as much as you want,” says his wife Debbie, as she watches a nurse draw a pint. “If if keeps him from griping about how much my presents cost, make it a quart.”