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

Abstract

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?