ABSTRACT
Today, we can speak of hemophilia as a manageable disease. In the three decades following World War II, this poorly understood malady was transformed into a well-characterized blood coagulation disorder that could be normalized using clotting factor replacement therapies. A critical turning point in the effort to manage hemophilic bleeding occurred in the early 1970s when clotting factor concentrates became widely available for patient use in the United States and other developed nations. At that time, the American media was portraying the new treatments as a considerable breakthrough for hemophilia patients and their families. In 1971, Science Digest went so far as to say that the hemophilia patient had been “freed of the life-threatening, disabling terror of hemorrhage.”1 Or, as one advertising campaign from the era put it, the clotting factor concentrate was the hemophiliac’s “passport to freedom.”2 While such descriptions were hyperbolic and failed to capture the complexity of the disease or its management, clotting factor concentrates did help transform the lives of hemophilia patients and their families.3 Moreover, the availability and subsequent use of clotting factor concentrates represented the culmination of historical efforts by hematologists to translate their laboratory endeavors into techniques for controlling hemophilic bleeding in clinical settings and beyond.4 For many advocates of hemophilia management, these concentrates affirmed the power of medical science to shape our experience of nature, bodies, people, institutions, technologies, and knowledge. Of course, the freedoms enjoyed by hemophilia patients today were also won through the discipline and sacrifice of previous sufferers. For one largely invisible population of hemophiliacs those sacrifices were quite literal; and here I am speaking of the scores of dogs that researchers have bred, maintained, and used in laboratories since the late 1940s to study hemophilia and its management. This essay describes how dogs with inherited bleeding disorders were brought into laboratory settings in the United States, suggests how this move contributed to the discipline of hemophilia management, and speaks to the value of understanding what historians of biology and biomedical
science mean when they claim that laboratory organisms are products of scientific and social practice.5
