The revolutionary medical practice of human-to-human blood transfusion was a relatively new technique in the nineteenth century and had a profound impact on the popular imagination of the time, says Associate Professor of English Ann Kibbie.
The revolutionary medical practice of human-to-human blood transfusion was a relatively new technique in the nineteenth century and had a profound impact on the popular imagination of the time, says Associate Professor of English Ann Kibbie.
Kibbie discusses the intersection of literary and medical worlds in her latest work, Blood and Sympathy in the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (University of Virginia Press, 2019). It examines the medical discourse that surrounded the real nineteenth-century practice of transfusion—which focused on women suffering from uterine hemorrhage—alongside literary works that exploited the operation’s sentimental, satirical, sensational, and gothic potentials.
Kibbie recently sat down with Professor of English and Cinema Studies Aviva Briefel at a campus event to promote the launch of her book. Briefel began by asking Kibbie where she got the idea for a literary work about blood transfusion.
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