Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in 20th-Century America
Johns Hopkins University Press: 1997. Pp. 288 $39.95, £163;33
Surprisingly, therefore, Wailoo has chosen technical advances in haematology rather than cardiology to address these issues. He begins his investigation with the mysterious illness chlorosis, a disease that has now disappeared from the scene but which was frequently diagnosed in young women earlier this century; its name refers to the greenish hue to the skin, which, together with extreme lethargy and depression, characterized the syndrome. With the development of methods for examining the blood, it became clear that many of these patients had a hypochromic anaemia, which, it was later found, may indicate iron deficiency. These labels do not, as the new technocrats of haematology apparently suggested, say anything definitive about the gen-esis of chlorosis; both hypochromic anaemia and iron deficiency have many causes. Later writers thought that the disease may have reflected the social strains, diets and precarious state of iron balance at a particular stage of a young woman's development, an interpretation that the author concludes “highlights medicine's enduring desire to define, through technology, a legitimate female identity”!
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