Strange Blood

In the mid-1870s, the experimental therapy of lamb blood transfusion spread like an epidemic across Europe and the USA. Doctors tried to use it as a cure for tuberculosis, pellagra, and anemia; proposed it as a means to reanimate seemingly dead soldiers on the battlefield. It was a contested therapy because it meant crossing boundaries and challenging taboos.
The book takes the reader on a unique journey into hospital wards and lunatic asylums, physiological laboratories and 19th century wars. It presents a fascinating story of medical knowledge, ambitions, and concerns - a story that provides valuable lessons for current debates on the morality of medical experimentation and care.

Boel Berner is a sociologist, historian, and professor emerita at Linköping University in Sweden. In her research she investigates the character and power of technical and medical expertise, historically and today. She has studied technical education and work, the gendered nature of technical knowledge, household technology, and issues of risk. Her current work is oriented towards the history of medicine. It focuses, besides issues of blood donation and transfusion, on the politics of blood group analysis in the interwar years.