ABSTRACT
Care is a concept with an ever-broadening range of meanings ‘involving care for, care of and care about’. With no clotting factor and few diagnostic tools, a range of networks and technologies of care were used to try to stop Colin's bleeding and prevent new bleeds from starting. These included hospital care from which parents were almost excluded, rest, traction, hydrotherapy, heat to reduce bleed masses, physiotherapy, and callipers. Technologies and the devices that are part of them are products of particular historical processes and derive some meaning from their history as well as from the social, cultural, gendered, and biological contexts with which they are in productive interaction. Treatment and testing technologies and their networks of care may be theorised as forms of biopower. Haemophilia clotting factor replacement products derived from human blood were initially received as a great gift.
