Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in Twentieth-Century America

by Keith Wailoo

Overview

In Drawing Blood, medical historian Keith Wailoo uses the story of blood diseases to explain how physicians in this century wielded medical technology to define disease, carve out medical specialties, and shape political agendas. As Wailoo's account makes clear, the seemingly straightforward process of identifying disease is invariably influenced by personal, professional, and social factors—and as a result produces not only clarity and precision but also bias and outright error.

Drawing Blood reveals the ways in which physicians and patients as well as the diseases themselves are simultaneously shaping and being shaped by technology, medical professionalization, and society at large. This thought-provoking cultural history of disease, medicine, and technology offers an important perspective for current discussions of HIV and AIDS, genetic blood testing, prostate-specific antigen, and other important issues in an age of technological medicine.

"Makes clear that the high stakes involved in medical technology are not just financial, but moral and far reaching. They have been harnessed to describe clinical phenomena and to reflect social and cultural realities that influence not only medical treatment but self-identity, power, and authority."—Susan E. Lederer, H-Net Humanities & Social Sciences On Line

"Wailoo's masterful study of hematology and its disease discourse is a model of interdisciplinarity, combining cultural analysis, social history, and the history of medical ideas and technology to produce a complex narrative of disease definition, diagnosis, and treatment... He reminds us that medical technology is a neutral artifact of history. It can be, and has been, used to clarify and to cloud the understanding of disease, and it has the potential both to constrain and to emancipate its subjects."—Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801870293
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	04/01/2019
Series:	The Henry E. Sigerist Series in the History of Medicine
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Keith Wailoo is an associate professor in the Department of Social Medicine and the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Keith Wailoo is the Townsend Martin Professor of History and Public Affairs and Vice Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He is author of The Troubled Dream of Genetic Medicine: Ethnicity and Innovation in Tay-Sachs, Cystic Fibrosis, and Sickle Cell Disease and Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in Twentieth-Century America, and he is coeditor of Three Shots at Prevention: The HPV Vaccine and the Politics of Medicine’s Simple Solutions, all published by Johns Hopkins.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Putting the Question to Technology
Chapter 1. "Chlorosis" Remembered: Disease and the Moral Management of American Women
Chapter 2. The Rise and Fall of Splenic Anemia: Surgical Identity and Ownership of a Blood Disease
Chapter 3. Blood Work: The Scientific Management of Aplastic Anemia and Industrial Poisoning
Chapter 4. The Corporate "Conquest" of Pernicious Anemia: Technology, Blood Researchers, and the Consumer
Chapter 5. Detecting "Negro Blood": Black and White Identities and the Reconstruction of Sickle Cell Anemia
Chapter 6. "The Forces That Are Molding Us": The National Politics of Blood and Disease After World War II
Conclusion: Disease Identity in the Age of Technological Medicine
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

Wailoo's analysis breaks new ground . . . he uses a wide array of sources and types of data to carry out an insightful analysis of a diverse sample of 20th-century hematologic diseases.
—Robert A. Aronowitz, M.D., New England Journal of Medicine

This book is a marvelous example of how many threads can be spun together to create a compelling narrative. It interweaves histories of disease over the past century, of technology, of hematology, and of medicine in the broadest sense. . . .This book [is] a fine history of the practice of medicine . . . Drawing Blood is first-class history at many levels and can be read with profit and pleasure by the clinician, historian, non-medical scientist, and interested layperson.
—Science

Boldly and skillfully, Wailoo analyzes not only the role of physicians but of research hospitals and pharmaceutical companies. In addition, he shows how things like race, gender, and lifestyle influenced how physicians defined and responded to the very diseases that were called into existence by the new technologies they employed.
—American Historical Review

Makes clear that the high stakes involved in medical technology are not just financial, but moral and far reaching. They have been harnessed to describe clinical phenomena and to reflect social and cultural realities that influence not only medical treatment but self-identity, power, and authority.
—Susan E. Lederer, H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net

Wailoo's masterful study of hematology and its disease discourse is a model of interdisciplinarity, combining cultural analysis, social history, and the history of medical ideas and technology to produce a complex narrative of disease definition, diagnosis, and treatment . . . He reminds us that medical technology is a neutral artifact of history. It can be, and has been, used to clarify and to cloud the understanding of disease, and it has the potential both to constrain and to emancipate its subjects.
—Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Pain: A Political History isn't your usual medical focus, but provides socio-political emphasis on compassionate relief and society's liberal trends and conservative actions, discussing the development of pain theories in politics, law and social circles and how the evolution of a post-war pain relief economy in response to recovering soldiers fostered the rise of a liberal pain standard and changing attitudes about pain's realities and limitations. Its wide-ranging and unusual focus makes this a "must" not necessarily for health holdings, but for those looking at the bigger picture.
—James A Cox, The Midwest Book Review

A lively and readable account of the complex and evolving interplay between pain medicine, public policy and politics in the United States.
—Medical History

From the Publisher

"Wailoo's masterful study of hematology and its disease discourse is a model of interdisciplinarity, combining cultural analysis, social history, and the history of medical ideas and technology to produce a complex narrative of disease definition, diagnosis, and treatment... He reminds us that medical technology is a neutral artifact of history. It can be, and has been, used to clarify and to cloud the understanding of disease, and it has the potential both to constrain and to emancipate its subjects."

Journal of Interdisciplinary History - Regina Morantz-Sanchez

"Pain: A Political History isn't your usual medical focus, but provides socio-political emphasis on compassionate relief and society's liberal trends and conservative actions, discussing the development of pain theories in politics, law and social circles and how the evolution of a post-war pain relief economy in response to recovering soldiers fostered the rise of a liberal pain standard and changing attitudes about pain's realities and limitations. Its wide-ranging and unusual focus makes this a "must" not necessarily for health holdings, but for those looking at the bigger picture."

The Midwest Book Review - James A Cox

"Boldly and skillfully, Wailoo analyzes not only the role of physicians but of research hospitals and pharmaceutical companies. In addition, he shows how things like race, gender, and lifestyle influenced how physicians defined and responded to the very diseases that were called into existence by the new technologies they employed."

American Historical Review

"... a lively and readable account of the complex and evolving interplay between pain medicine, public policy and politics in the United States..."

Medical History

"Wailoo's analysis breaks new ground... he uses a wide array of sources and types of data to carry out an insightful analysis of a diverse sample of 20th-century hematologic diseases."

New England Journal of Medicine - Robert A. Aronowitz

"Makes clear that the high stakes involved in medical technology are not just financial, but moral and far reaching. They have been harnessed to describe clinical phenomena and to reflect social and cultural realities that influence not only medical treatment but self-identity, power, and authority."

H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net - Susan E. Lederer

"This book is a marvelous example of how many threads can be spun together to create a compelling narrative. It interweaves histories of disease over the past century, of technology, of hematology, and of medicine in the broadest sense....This book [is] a fine history of the practice of medicine... Drawing Blood is first-class history at many levels and can be read with profit and pleasure by the clinician, historian, non-medical scientist, and interested layperson."

Science

Reviewer: Charles S. Bryan, MD (University of South Carolina School of Medicine)
Description: This monograph, the ninth volume in the Henry E. Sigerist Series in the History of Medicine, features six essays dealing with aspects of the history of twentieth-century hematology. These are "chlorosis," "splenic anemia," aplastic anemia, pernicious anemia, sickle cell disease, and the politics of hematology subsequent to World War II.
Purpose: The author's purpose is to demonstrate how technology affects the identity of disease within the context of "a larger question about the construction of knowledge in modern medicine."
Audience: This book will be an essential reference to medical historians and sociologists who seek to understand twentieth-century hematology. The book's underlying theme and its numerous instructive anecdotes will also appeal to the much larger audience of persons concerned more broadly with healthcare delivery.
Features: "Chlorosis" was a frequently-made diagnosis in young women with vague complaints at the turn of the century. Its disappearance from the medical literature is explained only in part by the recognition of iron-deficiency anemia. In 1901, two Chicago surgeons performed splenectomy in an anemic young woman, giving rise to a popular notion of "splenic anemia." How many splenectomies were performed before this entity, too, fell from favor is unknown. The author also relates how various social, economic, and political agendas affected the emerging concepts of aplastic anemia, pernicious anemia, and hemoglobinopathy.
Assessment: This is an important contribution to a field of inquiry dealing with the interface of disease entities and the societies in which they occur. Building on previous work of this kind (see especially Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History CE Rosenberg, J Golden, eds., New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), the author demonstrates that, in these instances at least, the epistemology of disease is seldom unbiased. Recipient of the American Public Health Association's Arthur Viseltear Prize, Dr. Wailoo has given us a scholarly, extensively referenced book that is likely to become a standard reference.

Doody's Review Service

Wailoo's masterful study of hematology and its disease discourse is a model of interdisciplinarity, combining cultural analysis, social history, and the history of medical ideas and technology to produce a complex narrative of disease definition, diagnosis, and treatment... He reminds us that medical technology is a neutral artifact of history. It can be, and has been, used to clarify and to cloud the understanding of disease, and it has the potential both to constrain and to emancipate its subjects.

— Regina Morantz-Sanchez

Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Makes clear that the high stakes involved in medical technology are not just financial, but moral and far reaching. They have been harnessed to describe clinical phenomena and to reflect social and cultural realities that influence not only medical treatment but self-identity, power, and authority.

— Susan E. Lederer

H-Net

Wailoo's analysis breaks new ground... he uses a wide array of sources and types of data to carry out an insightful analysis of a diverse sample of 20th-century hematologic diseases.

— Robert A. Aronowitz, M.D.

The New England Journal of Medicine