Blood Relations

"A bang‐up book. . . . The history of blood transfusion is a major driver of our understanding of human genetics. I wish that the late Louis K. Diamond and Fred H. Allen, two of the foremost blood group geneticists in the United States whom I knew well, were still with us to read and enjoy this fine survey." 

“Blood Relations is a brilliant and engaging study of the science and the politics of blood. Bangham tracks the story of the practices of blood collection and analysis in Britain after 1900 in ways that vividly illuminate race science, human genetics, nationalism, and war. In her empirically rich account, blood ties together donors, clerks, serologists, geneticists, and anthropologists. The beautifully curated archival images and charts call our attention to the many kinds of labor and laborer involved in modern science. The account of the rise of human genetics is persuasive and novel, situated at the intersections of the history of science, medicine, and modernity. An important and powerful book, Blood Relations is required reading for scholars in the field, but also warmly accessible to any general reader with an interest in the moving human story of how and why blood became a medical, social, and scientific resource.”

"Bangham tells a stunningly original story: how the science of human blood groups evolved in Britain, from its uses in the transfusion services in World War II through its transformation by the 1960s into a powerful enabler of human population genetics. She exploits a rich trove of archival sources to detail the system of labeling, description, record-keeping, and analysis devised by the leaders of London's blood research centers: R. A. Fisher, Ruth Sanger, and Arthur Mourant. This is, in all, a great feast of a book."

"In this masterful study, Bangham sheds new light on the history of human genetics. Looking beyond eugenics, she shows how much human genetics owed to the development of blood transfusion in mid-twentieth century Britain. To tell her riveting story, she brings in a fascinating set of characters including donors, nurses, needle sharpeners, and clerks. Bangham argues convincingly that the state infrastructure put in place on the eve of World War II was essential in producing the collections of blood and data on which depended the rise of the new science."