Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce
Author: Douglas Starr
Powerfully involving narrative and incisive detail, clarity and inherent drama: Blood offers in abundance the qualities that define the best popular science writing. Here is the sweeping story of a substance that has been feared, revered, mythologized, and used in magic and medicine from earliest times--a substance that has become the center of a huge, secretive, and often dangerous worldwide commerce.
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Blood was described by judges as "a gripping page-turner, a significant contribution to the history of medicine and technology and a cautionary tale. Meticulously reported and exhaustively documented."
Dallas Morning News
Reads like a thriller. Starr is a wonderful storyteller as well as a sober historian.
New Yorker
This rewarding book, filled with sharp science, has everything from a brief survey of bloodletting to an account of the massive mobilization of donated blood for the Allied invasion of Normandy. But its real subject is the postwar rise of the 'blood-services complex,' which controls the global market for blood products.
Scientific American
Blood should be included in all first- and second-year medical curricula.
Los Angeles Times
A gripping page-turner, a significant contribution to the history of medicine and technology and a cautionary tale.
Judges' citation
Houston Chronicle
[A] cast-of-thousands continent-spanning saga, complete with heroic physicians and dastardly entrepreneurs....Starr's history....inspires a more profound appreciation for a substance we sometimes take for granted.
Washington Post Book World
Thoroughly researched and often shocking.
Village Voice Literary Supplement
Starr writes like a wildly enthusiastic high school biology teacher who arrives each day bristling with excitement, leaping about before the chalkboard, cracking jokes, and zealously banging his fist on his desk. Even the most indifferent brats pay attention, and so too will readers....Starr has created what amounts to a history of the human race perceived through the filter of blood as medical product.
New England Journal of Medicine
Blood is a story of human frailty and courage, a book from which any reader could learn.
Newsday
Meticulously researched, elegantly told.
Entertainment Weekly
Starr's lively history . . . courses with greed, altruism, and woozily vivid detail.
Richard Bernstein
Riveting. . . . A fascinating history. . . . A rich story admirably told. —New York Times
Atlanta Journal
Definitive...an outstanding chronicle.
Boston Globe
Illuminating.
Entertainment Weekly - Megan Harlan
...[A] lively history....
Scientific American
Blood should be included in all first- and second-year medical curricula.
New York Review of Books
Fascinating...Starr's book is the story of blood, but it is also the story of money, and the dance of death the two of them have lately been doing.
Houston Chronicle
[A] cast-of-thousands continent-spanning saga, complete with heroic physicians and dastardly entrepreneurs. . . . Starr's history . . . inspires a more profound appreciation for a substance we sometimes take for granted.
Washington Post Book World
Thoroughly researched and often shocking.
New England Journal of Medicine
Blood is a story of human frailty and courage, a book from which any reader could learn.
Village Voice Literary Supplement
Starr writes like a wildly enthusiastic high school biology teacher who arrives each day bristling with excitement, leaping about before the chalkboard, cracking jokes, and zealously banging his fist on his desk. Even the most indifferent brats pay attention, and so too will readers. . . . Starr has created what amounts to a history of the human race perceived through the filter of blood as medical product.
New Yorker
This rewarding book, filled with sharp science, has everything from a brief survey of bloodletting to an account of the massive mobilization of donated blood for the Allied invasion of Normandy. But its real subject is the postwar rise of the 'blood-services complex,' which controls the global market for blood products.
Dallas Morning News
Reads like a thriller. Starr is a wonderful storyteller as well as a sober historian.
Publishers Weekly
The co-director of Boston University's graduate program in science journalism shows how it's done in this exemplary study of the role that blood has played in human affairs. Although Starr begins the story centuries ago, he concentrates on modern times. Throughout his coverage, information about advances in biology and physiology is introduced as needed, often enabling the reader to share in the excitement of scientific discovery. But this book is about much more than just biology. The politics of blood play a central role, from our race with the Germans during the Second World War to develop a system to enable battlefield transfusions to the squabbling and animosity present among the various blood collection agencies in the U.S. As Starr makes clear, as the global traffic in blood and blood products has expanded into a multibillion-dollar operation, the financial bottom line has begun to outweigh the importance of medical benefits. In riveting fashion, Starr explains how business practices enabled the AIDS virus to permeate the world's blood supply, leading to thousands of unnecessary deaths, particularly among hemophiliacs. Truly frightening are tales of the harvesting of blood and plasma from indigent and unhealthy third-world natives and the unwillingness of governments, third- and first-world alike, to take action to protect their citizens. Clear-eyed and wrought with superb attention to detail, this is first-class science writing, with a striking message. (PW best book of 1998).
Library Journal
Starr, codirector of the graduate program in science journalism at Boston University, energetically plunges into the social, ethical, and economic history of one of the most mysterious and culturally pertinent resources in human history: our very blood. He starts with the first blood transfusion, from a calf to a man, in 1667 Paris and runs through the changing mythological landscape, medical advances, and the political (and certainly military) power associated with possessing a rich blood supply. He closes with a discussion of contemporary issues, such as the threat posed by regarding blood as a commodity. This is science writing at its best: well researched, socially relevant, and highly enjoyable. (LJ 8/98)
Booknews
Starr (Journalism, Boston U.) briefly traces the role of blood in human history, health, and religion down the ages, but focuses on the scientific discoveries of the past couple of centuries that have made blood and its components into a five-billion-dollar a year worldwide business. He discusses the spread of AIDS through contaminated blood, the use of plasma to make drugs, various scandals that continue to erupt, and the latest attempts to make artificial blood.
Richard Bernstein
...[A] rich story admirably told... -- The New York Times
Business Week
An intriguing book with some important lessons for public health.
Deborah Blum
...Starr's book does not, in any sense, favor combat. His description of the carnage of the battlefield is unflinchingly grim....illustrates more than one of the real paradoxes of medicine. Practice balances...between detachment and compassion. -- The New York Times Book Review
The New Yorker
This rewarding book, filled with sharp science, has everything from a brief survey of bloodletting to the massive mobilization of donated blood for the invasion of Normandy. But its real subject is the postwar rise of the 'blood-services-complex,' which controls the global market for blood products.
NY Review of Books
Fascinating...Starr's book is the story of blood, but it is also the story of money, and the dance of death the two of them have lately been doing.
Megan Harlan
...[A] lively history.... -- Entertainment Weekly
The Advocate
An exhaustive expose of the world-wide business of blood. Starr traces the links between the AIDS crisis and the distribution of contaminated blood products in the early 80's...An unnerving must-read on how the politics of blood affects us all.
The Sciences
Spellbinding.
Kirkus Reviews
Seasoned journalist and former field biologist Starr writes an outstandingly lively history, based largely on archival research and interviews, of an unexpectedly dramatic topic: the international science, economics, and politics of blood transfusion. The topic subsumes several others: methods of collecting and storing blood, of deconstructing it (isolating out its several components, especially the clotting agent Factor VIII, so crucial to the health of hemophiliacs), and screening it for disease. The story begins in the 17th century, when the French doctor Jean-Baptiste Denis first transfused calf's blood into a crazed patient, inducing a fever that temporarily cured him of syphilis. It proceeds up until the late 20th century, when angry hemophiliacs, infected with HIV by contaminated blood, brought suits against doctors and blood banks in Japan, France, and America. In between, Starr recounts the heroic transfusing efforts of donors, doctors, and military personnel during WWII, which saved countless front-line soldiers' lives; the postwar competition among modern blood banks; and the rise of the blood-buying business, which too often exploited the poor and unhealthy. Several tensions move the drama: between medical professionals and service-minded laypeople; between government health agencies and business-oriented blood banks; and between views of blood as purchasable commodity and as humanitarian gift. The history of blood—sanguine though it is by definition—is thus far from uniformly rosy. Starr, an accomplished storyteller, weaves his plot around the great, eccentric, and sometimes tragic personalities of blood history, lightening it with humorous anecdotes,as of Bela Lugosi (alias Dracula) donating blood to American servicemen during WWII in order to make good on his 'ill-gotten gains.' A potentially dramatic tension Starr might have explored further, in his final chapters on AIDS, is between the two politically vocal—but otherwise very different—communities of HIV-infected hemophiliacs and gay men. Transfused into such good narrative history, Blood will interest even those who can't stand the sight of it.
Table of Contents:
| Preface | ||
| 1 | The Blood of a Gentle Calf | 3 |
| 2 | "There Is No Remedy As Miraculous As Bleeding" | 17 |
| 3 | A Strange Agglutination | 31 |
| 4 | Blood on the Hoof | 53 |
| 5 | Prelude to a Blood Bath | 72 |
| 6 | War Begins | 88 |
| 7 | Blood Cracks like Oil | 101 |
| 8 | Blood at the Front | 122 |
| 9 | Dr. Naito | 147 |
| 10 | Dr. Cohn | 163 |
| 11 | The Blood Boom | 186 |
| 12 | Bad Blood | 207 |
| 13 | Wildcat Days | 231 |
| 14 | The Blood-Services Complex | 250 |
| 15 | Outbreak | 266 |
| 16 | "All Our Lots Are Contaminated" | 299 |
| 17 | Judgment | 322 |
| Epilogue: Blood in a Post-AIDS Society | 345 | |
| Notes | 357 | |
| Acknowledgments | 415 | |
| Index | 419 |
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