“What flows between us”

Long circumscribed to a “technician” history of medicine, the history of blood donation and transfusion was a history without actors – aside from doctors, of course – and especially without any stakes involved other than a certain idea of constant progress in medicine. Historiography may therefore have appeared to be out of step, and even belated, in examining these subjects. Since the emergence of what is today called the new social history of medicine, historians have focused on the social construction of medicine, understood as a field (Bourdieu 1998) in which interactions among various actors (patients, politicians, doctors, etc.) contribute to the emergence of new public health models (Fassin 2000). This shift in perspective today allows us to consider the history of blood donation and transfusion practices from a new angle. The history of blood transfusion in the United States must be examined in terms of two major problems that have intersected at various moments in their evolution: the question of its institutionalization (Boltanski 2009; Boltanski and Thévenot 1991) and of its racialization (Wieviorka 1996). This chapter seeks to provide a historical synthesis focused on the evolution of transfusion and blood donation in the United States, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the start of the 1980s. The aim is to capture the ambivalence of blood donation. ² Indeed, defined by their status as a healthcare technique and a commodity, blood donation and transfusion also appear, reading between the lines, as political tools that define belonging to a community (Anderson 1983; Douglas 1966).