When I married in the early 1970s I remember my fiance and I needed blood tests to check if we were Rh compatible. I knew it affected our ability to have children.
That is about all I knew about Rh disease. Until reading Good Blood, I had no idea how many people were affected by the disease, how many babies were lost, the depth of grief and despair suffered.
Or of the obsessed doctors who sought a cure over many years, or the 'man with the golden arm" who donated blood 1,173 times, saving 2.4 million babies.
Guthrie's moving history is filled with memorable and remarkable people.
I received an ebook from Publisher's Weekly.
Good Blood: A Doctor, a Donor, and the Incredible Breakthrough that Saved Millions of Babies
by Julian Guthrie
Abrams Press
Pub Date September 8, 2020
ISBN: 9781419743313
hardcover $26.00 (USD)
from the publisher
A remarkable, uplifting story about one of the greatest medical breakthroughs of the 20th century
In 1951 in Sydney, Australia, a fourteen-year-old boy named James Harrison was near death when he received a transfusion of blood that saved his life. A few years later, and half a world away, a shy young doctor at Columbia University realized he was more comfortable in the lab than in the examination room. Neither could have imagined how their paths would cross, or how they would change the world.
In Good Blood, bestselling writer Julian Guthrie tells the gripping tale of the race to cure a horrible blood disease known as Rh disease that stalked families and caused a mother’s immune system to attack her own unborn child. The story is anchored by two very diļ¬erent men on two continents: Dr. John Gorman in New York, who would land on a brilliant yet contrarian idea, and an unassuming Australian whose almost magical blood—and his unyielding devotion to donating it—would save millions of lives.
Good Blood takes us from Australia to America, from research laboratories to hospitals, and even into Sing Sing prison, where experimental blood trials were held. It is a tale of discovery and invention, the progress and pitfalls of medicine, and the everyday heroics that fundamentally changed the health of women and babies.
