ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the processes by which sickle cell disease became an ethnicized condition, one described by European physicians as pertaining to “immigration haematology”. It considers how ethnicity became the lens to bring sickle cell into view in particular ways at particular times, and how ethnicity was mobilized both in advocating, and in resisting, the development of services for sickle cell, especially in the UK. The chapter deals with an assessment of the prospects that ethnicity will disappear from the sickle cell cosmology. The case of sickle cell disturbs many assumptions about the relationship between blood and belonging, and disturbs them for several reasons. Classic texts on medical screening suggest that targeting screening for sickle cell would be unproblematic. Even a post-colonial rendering of history, in which original knowledge of sickle cell symptomatology, and in particular of its inherited nature, is relocated in Africa risks deepening the assumed primordial association of sickle cell and black skin.
