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 ...