Book Review

摘要

In , Kara Swanson takes ‘a new look at an old problem’ (p. 2) – the scarcity, rationing and allocation of human body products. Tracing the history of the development of blood, breast milk, and semen banks ‘from the nineteenth-century experiments that made such therapeutics possible to the twenty-first century websites that facilitate body product exchanges’ (p. 5), she provides a compelling analysis of how American society has commodified the human body via banks, which are a double metaphor in this context: a place where human body products are deposited, stored and withdrawn, but also bought and sold as part of the capitalist market forces of medical supply and demand.