The Bleeding Disease

Hemophilia and the Unintended Consequences of Medical Progress
Erscheinungsjahr 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4214-0115-7
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 400 Seiten, Format (B × H): 159 mm x 236 mm, Gewicht: 667 g

By the 1970s, a therapeutic revolution, decades in the making, had transformed hemophilia from an obscure hereditary malady into a manageable bleeding disorder. Yet the glory of this achievement was short lived. The same treatments that delivered some normalcy to the lives of persons with hemophilia brought unexpectedly fatal results in the 1980s when people with the disease contracted HIV-AIDS and Hepatitis C in staggering numbers. The Bleeding Disease recounts the promising and perilous history of American medical and social efforts to manage hemophilia in the twentieth century.

This is both a success story and a cautionary tale, one built on the emergence in the 1950s and 1960s of an advocacy movement that sought normalcy—rather than social isolation and hyper-protectiveness—for the boys and men who suffered from the severest form of the disease.

Stephen Pemberton evokes the allure of normalcy as well as the human costs of medical and technological progress in efforts to manage hemophilia. He explains how physicians, advocacy groups, the blood industry, and the government joined patients and families in their unrelenting pursuit of normalcy—and the devastating, unintended consequences that pursuit entailed. Ironically, transforming the hope of a normal life into a purchasable commodity for people with bleeding disorders made it all too easy to ignore the potential dangers of delivering greater health and autonomy to hemophilic boys and men.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Pemberton, Stephen

Fachgebiete

• Medizin | Veterinärmedizin Medizin | Public Health | Pharmazie | Zahnmedizin Klinische und Innere Medizin Hämatologie, Transfusionsmedizin
• Medizin | Veterinärmedizin Medizin | Public Health | Pharmazie | Zahnmedizin Medizin, Gesundheitswesen Public Health, Gesundheitsmanagement, Gesundheitsökonomie, Gesundheitspolitik
• Medizin | Veterinärmedizin Medizin | Public Health | Pharmazie | Zahnmedizin Medizin, Gesundheitswesen Geschichte der Medizin

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Hemophilia as Pathology of Progress
1. The Emergence of the Hemophilia Concept
2. The Scientist, the Bleeder, and the Laboratory
3. Vital Factors in the Making of a Masculine World
4. Normality within Limits
5. The Hemophiliac's Passport to Freedom
6. Autonomy and Other Imperatives of the Health Consumer
7. The Mismanagement of Hemophilia and AIDS
Conclusion: The Governance of Clinical Progress in a Global Age
Notes
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Pemberton, Stephen
Stephen Pemberton is an associate professor in the Federated Department of History at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University, Newark. He is coauthor of The Troubled Dream of Genetic Medicine: Ethnicity and Innovation in Tay-Sachs, Cystic Fibrosis, and Sickle Cell Disease, also published by Johns Hopkins.

Stephen Pemberton is an associate professor in the Federated Department of History at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University, Newark. He is coauthor of The Troubled Dream of Genetic Medicine: Ethnicity and Innovation in Tay-Sachs, Cystic Fibrosis, and Sickle Cell Disease, also published by Johns Hopkins.