Body Banks: A History of Milk Banks, Blood Banks, and Sperm Banks in the United States

My dissertation traces the invention and development of a new form of banking, body banking. Today, the body bank as an institution that collects, stores, processes, and distributes a human body product is a taken-for-granted aspect of medicine in the United States. We donate to blood banks, we cherish sperm bank babies, and we contemplate many sorts of banks, including cord blood banks, gene banks, and egg banks. Such institutions have existed for the past century in the metaphorical shadow of financial banks, and like those better-studied banks have stirred considerable controversy. The driving question behind my dissertation is simply, why banks? How did we come to use "bank" to apply to bodies as well as to dollars? More intriguingly, what does this analogy show us and what is it hiding?

To answer these questions, I focus on three types of body products, the first products to be managed in the way we have come to know as "banking": human milk, blood, and semen. Banking of each fluid began with doctors seeking to use these products to provide medical treatment. Doctors sought to organize convenient and reliable supplies of these new therapeutics. Only once body products were disembodied and standardized through "banks" could doctors and patients deposit and withdraw them, like money in the bank.

The "bank" has done more than medicalize body fluids through institutional management. The bank metaphor has shaped the way Americans think about body products. Today we use the bank metaphor to consider how we could and should exchange organs, genes, tissues, and information about bodies. "Biobanking," as it is now sometimes called,¹ is a global phenomenon. It is also an internationally debated problem of ownership and resource allocation along the boundaries of the possible and the desirable.

These boundaries are the product of the history described in this dissertation. In a narrative that extends from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, the dissertation combines the history of science, law, medicine, and technology to explore what the body bank is and how it became possible. What is possible today relies upon the technologies of extraction and storage developed over the last century. These technologies in turn assume a biomedical approach to the body that allows the use of parts from a healthy person to cure a sick person, an approach that became mainstream during this period. Finally, the possibilities of biobanking also depend upon a legal regime that provides rules for property ownership and intimate relationships.

My historical analysis additionally considers the effects of the bank metaphor from its introduction in the late 1930s to the present. Today's debates about the desirability of biobanking are only the latest iteration of a long-standing critique of the relationship between body products and cash that is highlighted by the bank metaphor. Biobanking has been and is often portrayed as a troubling sign as the inappropriate commodification of the body.² The bank represents the intrusion of the market into the previously sacrosanct territory of the body and into personal relationships between mother and child, husband and wife, and doctor and patient. Much of the unease fueling the debates about biobanking arises from the fact that the body bank created a significant fracture in our sociocultural conception of the body. The body became a producer, a source of a raw ingredient. People could produce and consume body products, and third parties could buy, sell, and distribute them through markets. Disembodied, a product of a human body could be a commodity.³ The commodification debate has intellectual roots that reach back to Karl Marx, and across multiple discourse communities, including social science, law and policy, and popular discussions about medicine and the marketplace.⁴ The debate has been largely conducted by relying on dichotomies. "Free" or "paid," "donated" or "sold," and "market" or "nonmarket." These dichotomies are also actor's categories used by some of the participants in the twentieth-century history of body banking. Both actors and analysts have framed objects potentially subject to commodification...