My Body, My Bank

My Body, My Bank BANKING ON THE BODY: THE MARKET IN BLOOD, MILK, AND SPERM IN MODERN AMERICA. By Kara W. Swanson. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014. 352 Pages. $35.00.All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.-Leoben, Battlestar Galactica1We shall not cease from explorationAnd the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time.-T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding2I. IntroductionKara Swanson's first book, Banking on the Body: The Market in Blood, Milk, and Sperm in Modern America, is a meticulously researched history of the banking industries in milk, blood, and sperm in America from 1908 till into our century.3 It is an extremely useful read for anyone working in the field of bioethics, commodification, and property. It is exhaustive (perhaps occasionally too much so) when it tackles blood and milk banking-the latter a banking system that much less has been written on. It is less good on sperm banking. It deserves much praise and a little critique. I try to give both in this Review.This Review is divided into two parts. The first tries to capture in short form the story Swanson aims to tell. She focuses on the bloodbanking industry, giving it four of the six substantive chapters, with a chapter and a third for milk and a short chapter for sperm. In my Review I follow a similar path. I also specifically highlight a few of the important contributions of the book, especially in the relationship of product liability law with the development of conceptions of bio-property, something she does deftly that strikes me as quite a new story to tell.The second Part of this Review focuses on critique, layered from milder to deeper, though many of these are disguised praise (in that I see things in Swanson's account that she may not see!). My critique centers on four elements: (1) she could do more to clarify the role (or lack thereof) for law in the story; (2) the central notion of "the bank" and the idea of a metaphor taken from finance is a bit undertheorized in the work; (3) the book could use more dialogue with the commodification discourse more generally, especially its more nuanced articulations (this is the ubiquitous here is how I would have written your book section of the Review); and (4) the book's take on the role of gender and body banking is underdeveloped. None of these critiques, though, mar what is itself an excellent book.II. The StoryA. The FrameFor Swanson, the twentieth century is the story of the transformation of the human body and its parts into mass-produced commodities. In particular, it is the story of the rise of a particular kind of organization of this commerce that she seeks to show bridged the sale of blood, milk, and semen: the bank. Swanson traces the adoption of the "bank" and "banking" metaphor to Dr. Bernard Fantus in 1937, who while "working at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, borrowed the term bank from the world of finance to describe the organization of stored blood in his hospital, which he sought to manage like money in the bank."4 The introduction has the longest discussion of the notion of the role the bank plays in her story and what it means, so it is worth quoting slightly more from the book on this topic:The thread that links this century of history is the banking metaphor itself. . . . The banking metaphor has encouraged us to think of body products in terms of money and markets. This association was Fantus's original intention. . . .. . . .Taking the banking metaphor seriously led the medical profession and, later, policymakers to lose sight of Fantus's original goal of harnessing the market to serve communal ends. Instead we have allowed ourselves to become trapped in a dichotomy that is neither accurate nor useful. It is an inaccurate description of the experience of body product exchange to separate "gifts" from "commodities" as distinct and opposite. …