[Sci-tech-public] MIT STS Special Seminar: NICHOLAS WHITFIELD

[Randyn A. Miller]

MIT 
PROGRAM IN SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIETY 


SPECIAL SEMINAR


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


NICHOLAS WHITFIELD

MCGILL UNIVERSITY 


ABSTRACT
 

 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’. 

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. 

4 PM
WEDNESDAY
19 FEBRUARY 2014
E51-095
MIT CAMPUS | 2 AMHERST STREET



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