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Drawing Blood

Technology and Disease Identity in Twentieth-Century America

Keith Wailoo

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How physicians in this century wielded medical technology to define disease, carve out medical specialties, and shape political agendas.

Winner of the American Public Health Association Arthur Viseltear Prize

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...

How physicians in this century wielded medical technology to define disease, carve out medical specialties, and shape political agendas.

Winner of the American Public Health Association Arthur Viseltear Prize

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

Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.

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Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
304
ISBN
9780801870293
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

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

Author Bio
Keith Wailoo
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Keith Wailoo

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 the author of Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in Twentieth-Century America, Pain: A Political History, and Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health.
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