Strange Blood

In the mid-1870s, the experimental therapy of lamb blood transfusion spread like an epidemic across Europe and the USA. Doctors tried it as a cure for tuberculosis, pellagra and anemia; proposed it as a means to reanimate seemingly dead soldiers on the battlefield. It was a contested therapy because it meant crossing boundaries and challenging taboos. Was the transfusion of lamb blood into desperately sick humans really defensible? The book takes the reader on a journey into hospital wards and lunatic asylums, physiological laboratories and 19th century wars. It presents a fascinating story of medical knowledge, ambitions and concerns - a story that provides lessons for current debates on the morality of medical experimentation and care.

»Insgesamt hat die schwedische Medizinhistorikerin eine interessante und lesenswerte Studie vorgelegt, der [...] das Verdienst gebührt, ein ansonsten nur randständig wahrgenommenes Thema quellen- und facettenreich auszuleuchten.« Oliver Falk, VIRUS, 21 (2022) O-Ton: »When Lamb-to-Human Blood Transfusions Were All the Rage« - Boel Berner im Interview with newbooksnetwork.com am 12.10.2020. Besprochen in: https://lithub.com, 12.10.2020 https://www.books-readers.com, 10 (2020) Zeitsprung, 08.07.2020 Journal of Medical Humanities, 43 (2022), Ericka Johnson

Auteur
Boel Berner is a sociologist, historian, and professor emerita at Linköping University in Sweden. In her research she investigates the character and power of expertise, historically and today. She has studied education and work, the gendered nature of technical knowledge, household modernization, and issues of risk. Her current work is oriented towards the history of medicine. It focuses, besides questions of blood donation and transfusion, on the politics of blood group analysis in the interwar years.