Blood Picture: L. W. Diggs, Sickle Cell Anemia, and the South's First Blood Bank by Richard H. Nollan (review)

Long a staple of popular history, the biography is often a throwback to the "great man" genre of historical writing, where authors use breezy prose to write about the lives of important people in minute detail. By providing a lens to examine the period in which the subject lived and worked, biographies that examine larger questions can appeal to an academic audience as well. Blood Picture: L. W. Diggs, Sickle Cell Anemia, and the South's First Blood Bank shows the promises and pitfalls of using biography as a form of historical analysis, as it examines the life of Lemuel Whitley Diggs, a Memphis physician and medical researcher whose life spanned much of the twentieth century.

Richard H. Nollan chronicles the life of L. W. Diggs from his birth in Hampton, Virginia, at the turn of the twentieth century to his death in 1995. While examining Diggs's family and personal life in some detail, Nollan focuses most of his attention on Diggs's more than fifty-year career at the University of Tennessee Medical Units (now the University of Tennessee Health Science Center) in Memphis. More than simply an academic physician, medical scholar, and teacher, Diggs was instrumental in the dissemination of knowledge about sickle-cell disease (SCD) and established the first major center for the study of the disorder. His long career included significant research and publications on SCD, public outreach, and intense personal work with patients (almost all of whom were African American) and their families on living better with the disease. Tied in with his work on SCD and hematology, Diggs marshaled community and university resources to create the first blood bank in the South in 1938. Finally, Nollan examines Diggs's role in the founding of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, a hospital that treated catastrophic childhood illnesses free of charge to patients.

This book works best when Nollan discusses Diggs's relationship with both the city of Memphis and his fellow physicians and researchers. Diggs was not simply another doctor, but also an important figure in this emerging New South city. Nollan concludes that "Diggs's stature in the community and his reputation as a physician grew because of his sickle cell research and his interest in medical technology, especially his commitment to blood banking" (p. 80). Diggs's research, patient care, and commitment to teaching reflected the larger changes taking place in American academic medicine throughout the middle of the twentieth century. Using increased federal resources and grant monies, Diggs continued his work on sickle-cell disease and its relationship to the African American community. In recognition of his contributions to this field, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference awarded Diggs the Martin Luther King Medical Achievement Award in 1972, highlighting a life dedicated to service and a "doctor-patient relationship … based on trust and mutual respect" (p. 156).

While Nollan succeeds in allowing the reader to understand Diggs as a doctor, a family man, and an individual, he does less well in placing Diggs in the context of the Jim Crow South. Nollan tangentially examines issues of race throughout the book. Given that Diggs was engaged in a long-term longitudinal study of a disease and its effects on the black community, Nollan should certainly have given more attention to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study taking place at the same time. There also is little mention of black doctors during this period. The reader is left wondering how Diggs related to these physicians and what they thought of him and his research. As a layman with little medical knowledge of SCD, I would also have liked Nollan to have better explained the disease and its various permutations. These concerns, however, do not negate the value of this book. Though at times a bit hagiographic in his approach, Nollan...