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The history of blood donation tells a remarkable and optimistic story of human altruism, ingenuity, and social organization-but also of greed, racism, and negligence. These days, most of us take for granted that human blood can be extracted, stored, and infused in patients. In the past two decades, however, anthropologists began taking an interest not in the pristine symbolism of blood but in the actual substance-with all its red and gory messiness.Īnthropologists like myself find blood intriguing because of what it can reveal about a society: The specific ways the substance circulates outside and between bodies brings to light conflicting values, shifting political and ethical priorities, and the potentials and perils of economic systems. Anthropologists in the early 20th century were mostly interested in blood as a metaphor, a powerful symbol across cultures of vitality, kinship, sanctity, or defilement.
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How did these trillions of potent proteins, originating in thousands of human bodies, find their way to my son’s blood circulation? What historical, social, and economic conditions enabled this extraordinary exchange of substances? As a social and medical anthropologist, these questions were the prisms that guided my subsequent dive into the fascinating world of the blood industry.īlood has long been a focus for anthropological thinking. Once this crisis had passed, I began to marvel at the incredible blood donation system that had made his recovery possible. To my partner’s and my relief, the treatment worked: He got better almost immediately. Once his diagnosis was confirmed, he was treated through a procedure known as intravenous immunoglobulin therapy, in which antibodies collected from the blood plasma of between 1,000 and 10,000 donors are injected intravenously in the patient. It took just under a month of anxious head-scratching before doctors finally diagnosed his condition as Kawasaki disease, an uncommon form of autoimmune inflammatory vasculitis. In the spring of 2013, my son, then 5 months old, became very sick.