How blood met plastics, plant and animal extracts: Material encounters between medicine and industry in the twentieth century.

ABSTRACT

Twentieth-century medicine saw the remarkable rise of complex machines and infrastructures to process blood for medical purposes, such as transfusion, dialysis, and cardiac surgery. Instead of attributing these developments to technological ingenuity, this article argues for the primacy of material encounters as a promising focal point of medical historiography. In fact, blood's special properties consistently clashed with most materials used in medical practice, provoking a series of material exchanges. Drawing on a combination of epistemological and network approaches, three exemplary cases are presented to examine blood's encounters with plastics, plant and animal extracts William M. Bayliss's (1860-1926) injections of dissolved gum acacia to expand diminished blood volume; Charles H. Best's (1899-1978) production of the anticoagulant heparin from animal organs; and the preservation of fragile blood cells by silicone coatings inside of John H. Gibbon Jr.'s (1903-1973) heart-lung machine. The case studies demonstrate how the complementarity of blood and these materials produced hybridizations between medicine and a range of industrial branches, from colonial forestry and meatpacking to commercial chemistry. In this light, the paper concludes by discussing the dependencies of today's healthcare environments on globally distributed, capitalistically appropriated resources in the face of crises like the COVID-19 pandemic.