<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=windows-1252"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;"><div apple-content-edited="true" style="font-family: Optima-Regular; text-align: center;"><font size="2">MIT </font></div><div apple-content-edited="true" style="font-family: Optima-Regular; text-align: center;"><font size="2">PROGRAM IN SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIETY </font></div><div apple-content-edited="true" style="font-family: Optima-Regular; text-align: center;"><br></div><div apple-content-edited="true" style="font-family: Optima-Regular; text-align: center;"><font size="4"><br></font></div><div apple-content-edited="true" style="font-family: Optima-Regular; text-align: center;"><font size="4">SPECIAL SEMINAR</font></div><div apple-content-edited="true" style="font-family: Optima-Regular; text-align: center;"><br></div><div apple-content-edited="true" style="text-align: center;"><div style="font-family: Calibri; margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;"><br></div><div style="margin: 0px;"><font size="5"> <b>A Genealogy of the Gift: Blood Donation and Altruism in an Age of Strangers </b></font></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Optima-Regular; margin-bottom: 5pt;"><font size="2"><b><br></b></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Optima-Regular; margin-bottom: 5pt;"><font size="4"><b>NICHOLAS WHITFIELD</b></font></p><div style="font-family: Optima-Regular;">MCGILL UNIVERSITY </div><div style="font-family: Optima-Regular;"><br></div><div style="font-family: Optima-Regular;"><b><br></b></div><div style="font-family: Optima-Regular;"><b>ABSTRACT</b></div><div style="font-family: Optima-Regular;"> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-family: Calibri; min-height: 14px;"><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 11.5px;"> This talk will trace 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, and also on the first American blood banks of the 1930s, I review a period of profound change in the history of transfusion medicine in which practical procedures shifted from one-to-one surgical events to simplified, standardized technical routines. With technological developments came changes in the presentation of blood-giving as a moral accomplishment: 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’. </div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 11.5px;"><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-size: 11.5px;">My aim in drawing these comparisons is to give an account of some of the historical conditions motivating the moral languages of bodily donation and exchange. Furthermore, it is to encourage a new interpretation of the gift as a strategy for eliciting the cooperation of volunteer blood-givers, as against most traditional readings that present ‘gift talk’ as a faulty attempt to describe medical realities. In contrast to some existing scholarship that predicts 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 such rhetoric first arose in the industrialized, anonymous systems of the Second World War. </div><div style="font-family: Optima-Regular;"><br></div><div style="font-family: Optima-Regular;"><font size="4">4 PM</font></div><div style="font-family: Optima-Regular;"><font size="4">WEDNESDAY</font></div><div style="font-family: Optima-Regular;"><font size="4">19 FEBRUARY 2014</font></div><div style="font-family: Optima-Regular;"><font size="4">E51-095</font></div><div style="font-family: Optima-Regular;"><font size="4">MIT CAMPUS | 2 AMHERST STREET</font></div><div style="font-family: Optima-Regular;"><font size="4"><br></font></div><div style="font-family: Optima-Regular;"><font size="4"><br></font></div><div style="font-family: Optima-Regular;"><img apple-inline="yes" id="B03127F8-781F-45F2-8007-EF54A91815E0" height="63" width="66" apple-width="yes" apple-height="yes" src="cid:45625D3C-309D-4D48-B3AD-F0D80BBA5F24@mit.edu"></div></div>
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