Good Blood: A Doctor, a Donor, and the Incredible Breakthrough that Saved Millions of Babies

Julian Guthrie

Abrams, Sep 8, 2020 - Medical - 256 pages

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 different 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.
 

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - bell7 - LibraryThing

*E-ARC received from NetGalley with the understanding that I would post an honest review. No money or other goods were exchanged, and all views are my own.* Australian James Harrison has been giving ...

Good Blood: A Doctor, a Donor, and the Incredible Breakthrough That Saved Millions of Babies

User Review  - Publishers Weekly

Journalist Guthrie (How to Make a Spaceship) chronicles the joint efforts of the Australian blood donor and the doctor who helped to solve the mystery of Rh disease in the 1960s. The illness occurs ...

About the author

Julian Guthrie is a journalist and author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She spent twenty years at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she won numerous awards and had her writing nominated multiple times for the Pulitzer Prize. She is the author of four previous books, including the bestsellers The Billionaire and the Mechanic,How to Make a Spaceship, and her most recent, Alpha Girls.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Good Blood: A Doctor, a Donor, and the Incredible Breakthrough that Saved Millions of Babies
• Author: Julian Guthrie
• Publisher: Abrams, 2020
• ISBN: 1647000157, 9781647000158
• Length: 256 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Medical (incl. Patients); Medical / History; Science / Research & Methodology