Banking on the Body: The Market in Blood, Milk, and Sperm in Modern America

Northeastern University associate law professor Swanson explores the history of the collection, storage, and delivery of human body products, finding it stubbornly attached to the financial model of banking%E2%80%94and alarmingly predictive of current American health care indecision. Since the 1940s, Swanson argues, body banks for breast milk and blood have been "omnipresent," while attitudes toward them reflect "a medical profession unable to resolve its own conflicting commitments to health care access and to individual responsibility to pay for medical services." Swanson leads a fascinating journey to the origins of this muddle: from young Bostonian doctor Fritz Talbot's search for a wet nurse to help save one of his fragile newborn patients to Dr. Bernard Fantus's pioneering 1930s blood bank at Cook County Hospital in Chicago to the 1950s use of the blood bank model for the management of sperm that organized a practice extant since the late 1800s. Swanson predicts a complicated future along the frontiers of organ transplants, but her story "points the way for using body products as the private basis for promoting the public good." (May)