Word: blood
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Draws First Blood...
Technique of blood transfusion has enabled many an individual to help a sick or injured friend. It has also created a traffic in blood. Blood brokers organize professional donors and supply them to hospitals. The friendless patient pays $50 a pint for blood. Brokers exact 20% of that as commission. Manhattan has about 2,000 donors, half of them professionals, half occasionals (impoverished people, thrill seekers). One Thomas Kane, deckhand, after giving blood 100 times in 15 years, ''retired'' last week. He boasts himself the record holder and now considers selling patches of his skin...
Another donor, Robert Francis Gardiner, has sold his blood 73 times in nine years. Shrewd, he has assembled a gang of 300 robust Bowery down-&-outs, dock-wallopers, truck drivers and chauffeurs whose blood he sells to New York hospitals. Outdoor workers serve best...
Such commercial traffic has dangers. It cannot be closely supervised. Many a blood seller is diseased, many a one sells too often. It takes four to five weeks for such to replace their lost blood properly to provide for another transfusion. A doctor sometimes needs a donor in a hurry and has no time to make thorough blood tests and counts. He must rely on a seller's word, and many a man who will sell blood for a living will tell lies...
...attempt to put the commercial blood brokers out of business, the New York Academy of Medicine, County Medical Society and Health Department recently gave their joint blessing to an Association for the Transfusion of Blood in Aid of Suffering. This organization is semi-commercial, quasi eleemosynary. It charges the standard $50 a pint for blood, gives its selected sellers $45, keeps $5 for commission. It is under reliable medical control...