Histoire du don du sang

The Department of Social Studies of Medicine

presents

Dr.  NICHOLAS WHITFIELD 

Postdoctoral Fellow, Social Studies of Medicine, McGill University  

“A Genealogy of the Gift: Blood Donation and Altruism in an Age of Strangers”

WEDNESDAY  JANUARY 30,   2013

3647 Peel Street

Don Bates Seminar Room 101

3:30 p.m.

Abstract: This seminar traces the historical association of blood donation with narratives of gifting in the first half of the twentieth century. Focusing on two successive blood transfusion services in London between the 1920s and 1940s, I review a period of profound change in the history of transfusion medicine in which its practical procedures shifted from one-to-one surgical events to simplified, standardized technical routines. With these practical developments came changes in the presentation of blood-giving as a moral achievement: the grass roots and internationally-renowned Red Cross Blood Transfusion Service (RCBTS), which presented donation as a humanitarian pursuit restricted to a morally specific type of ‘pure altruist’, gave way to the Emergency Blood Transfusion Service (EBTS) of World War II, which focused less on individual motives than on the act of blood-giving itself, its accessibility to a wide population, and, in time, the language of ‘the gift in the battle line’. My aim in drawing this comparison is to give an account of the conditions motivating the language of the gift. In contrast to some existing analyses that predict the decline of the gift with the rise of anonymous and complex systems of bodily transfer, I will argue both that the era of face-to-face blood transfusion proved inhospitable to the individualized rhetoric of gifting, and that the gift’s true origins were in the industrialized, anonymous systems of the Second World War.

******ALL ARE WELCOME******

For more information consult our website http://www.mcgill.ca/ssom/upcoming-seminars- events