Body banks

At the turn of the twenty-first century, body product "banks" are both a taken-for-granted aspect of modern medical care, and feared icons of the commodification of the body by modern biomedicine. This dissertation is a history of the body bank in the United States, the country that pioneered the use of the bank metaphor to describe institutions which collect, store, process, and distribute a disembodied body product. From Progressive Era efforts to reduce infant mortality to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, it traces the development of such institutions throughout the twentieth century, focusing on breast milk, blood, and sperm. In each case ancient concepts of body fluids as sacred, vital, and hereditary interacted with the market ethos of a "bank" to create particularized notions of a human body product as commodity. Linking the history of biomedicine and technology with legal history, this dissertation draws upon the scientific and medical literatures and on judicial opinions to uncover the conditions which made body banks possible. These institutions created a moral and political economy of body products in which the relationships among cash, body product and markets existed in multiple forms, revealing not a story of increasing commodification over time, but rather layers of contestation and meaning along the boundaries between public and private, altruism and self-interest, and universality and particularity. This historical analysis of what has become the naturalized metaphor of the "bank" reveals the variety and agency which has been hidden behind this financial metaphor, and has been obscured during decades of debate about the merits of gifts vs. commodities as the preferred model for body part exchanges. I argue that the management of donor and recipient bodies, as well as of the mediating fluids, reveal contested concepts of pubic and private, gender identity, and property in the body. By including legal history in this narrative, this dissertation also exposes the relationship between the jurisprudential revolution in the second half of the twentieth century and the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s and the ways in which body banks have been created and transformed.