Good Blood is the story of two men who were involved in different ways in the search to prevent the deaths of Rh positive babies to mothers with Rh negative blood. Author Julian Guthrie draws us into the lives of the various individuals and definitely appeals to emotions. So compelling is the journey of Drs. Gorman and Freda that I could not stop reading till I finished the book. A few of the scientific explanations were difficult for me to comprehend, but most of it was not. The process to reach a workable solution was long and difficult. I had not realized that the treatment to save these babies wasn't available until 1968--just 11 years before it would have affected me personally, as I am Rh negative. The book is easy to get into because it reads like a novel and provides plenty of suspense. The separate stories of the two men, James Harrison and John Gorman, are alternately woven until their connection is ultimately revealed. I loved this book, and I am grateful to have had this chance to read the e-galley from BookExpo PW Galley Grab and NetGalley.

From NetGalley: "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."

Dr. John Gorman was desperate to find out why countless babies were dying in the womb--as mothers' immune systems attacked their own unborn children. Rh disease was devastating families all over the globe. His work would be instrumental in finding the cure. And then there is James Harrison, a childhood survivor himself, who in gratitude selflessly donated his "miracle blood."

This was a wonderful book. I don't tend to read a lot of medical nonfiction, but Julian Guthrie's writing captivates. The narrative flows nicely and is really accessible for those (like me!) who aren't very science-minded. I'd recommend this engaging read to those interested in medical history (Rh disease in particular) or people looking for a human interest story of the best in humanity overcoming one of the worst of its obstacles.

Thank you to Abrams Press for providing this digital copy for review.

I love a good medical story and learning about the development of medical techniques. Good Blood did not disappoint on this front. It read like literature but was clearly well researched.

There were some components that are particularly relevant to social issues. Experiments in prison raise moral questions. The rates of maternal mortality (even in developed nations) continue to be an issue even with the discoveries covered in Good Blood.

I think this book would make a great book club discussion. Especially if you're looking for something different from the fiction favorites. There are a lot of compelling issues to discuss and it's always nice to learn something!

Thank you very much to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read 'Good Blood'.

This is a fascinating, informative book detailing the discovery of a treatment for Rhesus Disease.
Parallel stories are told of the scientists involved in the scientific development and an ordinary, yet extraordinary man who unwittingly, becomes a key player in saving thousands of lives.

Definitely recommended for anyone interested in how major medical problems have been solved.

A beautiful book a book about science search for cures breakthroughs.Written in a warm human matter sharing the emotions of the two men .The scientific discussions were written in a style that even someone like me with very little scientific background could understand learn from.a book
I will be highly recommending,#netgalley#abramsboojs

I would like to thank NetGalley, the publisher, and author Julian Guthrie for providing me with an ARC of Good Blood!

This was a wonderful book that was truly about the beauty of medicine, but it was told in a way that was enjoyable and understandable. The Rh dilemma has always been of interest to me, especially when we first learned about it in high school. The author portrays our main characters wonderfully, but also brings other important people to the forefront as well. This was clear and concise, and so easy to follow along with. I really enjoyed this story, and recommend it to anyone that has even the slightest interest.

Thank you again to those named above for the chance to read and review this ARC!

James Christopher Harrison, an effervescent Aussie lad was all of fourteen years old, when a seemingly innocuous bug that caught him turned into a bad case of triple pneumonia. With the antibiotics failing to do their job, young Harrison’s condition worsened before it was decided that a pediatric pulmonary lobectomy, a complicated surgical procedure to excise the diseased portion of the lungs, had to be performed upon him. Three necrotic lung lobes, thirteen units of blood, and eleven hours of surgery later, young Harrison is finally wheeled out of the Operating Theatre. Surgeon Harry Windsor had miraculously brought Harrison back from the very brink. As the boy is recovering his devout father reminds him that the latter was saved by the “blood of strangers.” James Harrison promises his father, a donor himself, and his family that he would “return the favour.”

Dr. John G.Gorman booked himself a berth on the Queen Mary seeking to carve out a name for himself by sailing to the United States of America from his motherland, Australia. Armed with an insatiable curiosity and the book “Ideas Have Consequences” gifted by his father, Gorman was willing to risk it all in the search of achievement and professional success.

Julian Guthrie’s latest book, “Good Blood”, brings together the promise of James Harrison and the pedigree of Dr. John Gorman in a manner that will leave the reader poleaxed. An American journalist, and an acclaimed author, Ms. Guthrie has been nominated for the Pulitzer multiple number of times, and it is not at all hard to fathom why. In “Good Blood” which may be her best work yet, Ms. Guthrie’s writing is invested with passion and informed by a purpose. The unlikely, yet stupendous inter-linkage between the selfless contribution of a donor and the indefatigable pursuit of a doctor in combating the ravages of a peculiar disease targeting babies, puts even the raciest edge of the seat fiction thriller to utter disdain.

Dr. John Gorman after bagging himself a position at the Columbia Presbyterian Hospitalin Manhattan becomes obsessed with the workings of the insidious Rh Disease. In this disease, a baby inheriting Rh positive blood from the father, with the mother’s blood being Rh negative, gets its red cells destroyed by the mother’s own antibodies, made by the immune system to fight things it didn’t want in the body. This ultimately results in the baby developing anemia, and the mother having a miscarriage. Dr. Gorman finds an able perpetrator-in-crime in trying to decipher the intricacies of Rh disease in the form of Dr. Vince Freda. This eager beaver of a man and a former air force surgeon had the privilege of having studied for a year under Alexander Wiener, who in turn was a protégé of Karl Landsteiner, popularly known as “the Father of Blood Science.”

As doctors Gorman and Freda spend their every waking hour mulling about the Rh disease, unbeknownst to them, a continent away, James Harrison gets busy honouring the promise given by him to his father. Beginning to donate blood from the legally eligible age of eighteen, he goes about this task with a dedication bordering on the maniacal. As Ms. Guthrie informs her readers, “he went to donor mobiles – large converted school buses first called into use in Australia in 1942 – whenever they rolled into town, meeting different nurses and doctors with each visit. But when he got a promotion working in the accounting and clerical department at the railway and was relocated to Sydney, he found a home of sorts in the Red Cross blood bank at 1 York Street.” But James was met with a unique conundrum. His blood could be used only for research and not for transfusion. This was because of the presence of unusually high level of antibodies in his blood that when, transfused might create complications for the donee.

Meanwhile, Dr. Gorman gets his moment of epiphany courtesy a textbook given as a complementary copy by a traveling salesman from W.B. Saunders Company. Titled “General Pathology” and penned by Australian Nobel laureate Sir Howard Florey, the book is based on a series of lectures delivered in the school of pathology at Oxford. As Ms. Guthrie, writing in an effortlessly jaw dropping fashion informs her readers, “he {Gorman] flipped back to the table of contents and then forward to Chapter 34, page 697. The Chapter was titled, “Biological Factors in the Production of Antibodies.”……He continued reading until one sentence gave him pause: the presence of circulating antibody, whether produced actively or received passively, depresses and may completely inhibit the human response to the relevant antigen, although not to other antigens.” An excited Gorman tears off in search of Freda. The cure for Rh disease might be on the horizon!

Gorman and Freda embark on a fascinating trial recruiting convicts at the notorious Sing Sing prison facility. Their whole trial is based on the logic that when a mother is given passive antibodies thereby inhibiting her from producing her own antibodies, her immune system gets fooled into thinking that it has already responded to the Rh antigen. After a laborious wait and a daring, albeit potentially dangerous exercise of using Gorman’ sister-in-law Kath as an experimental candidate to test the passive antibodies with, Gorman and Freda’s efforts finally bear fruit and the United States Government officially grants approval to the RhoGAM shot. RhoGAM is an injection made up of antibodies called immunoglobulin that help protect a fetus from its mother’s antibodies.

This is where the book becomes most interesting and puts an end to the possibility of finishing it with a pair of dry eyes. Women who have already lost their babies to the dreaded Rh disease and people such as Harrison, whose plasma composition is unique thereby making it an ideal form of donation, are identified as potential donors of blood. The blood thus donated by these individuals, can then be used to save babies of mothers who are Rh negative. As Ms. Guthrie illustrates, oblivious to their own and irreparable loss, women flock in drones to blood collection centres to donate their blood so that mothers-to-be are spared a similar fate. In contrast to blood, blood plasma, can be donated as often as once every two weeks. Ms. Olive Semmler, who had one live child out of eight pregnancies, donated blood a stupendous five hundred odd times. “One woman who became a donor had lost ten babies to Rh disease. To get to the Sydney blood bank, she started her day by rowing up a river, walking a mile to the bus, then taking a train to the central station.”

But the most ebullient of all donors was James Harrison. Now that his blood could be used not just for research but also for actual transfusions, he made a staggering 1,173 donations throughout his lifetime. His last donation was when he was eighty-one years of age and eighty-one was the cut off age for donating blood in Australia. Harrison’s donations are estimated to have saved over 2.4 million unborn babies from Rh disease. Affectionately known throughout Australia as the “Man With The Golden Arm”, a perfect moniker for a cricket obsessed nation, Harrison was awarded the Medal of the Order Of Australia on the 7th of June 1999.

Gorman and Freda, went on to win the prestigious Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award in 1980 along with Cyril A. Clarke, Ronald Finn, and William Pollack for “pioneering work on the rhesus blood group system, the role of rhesus D antibodies in the causation of Rh disease and the prevention of Rh disease.”

The most poignant moment in the book, predictably, is reserved for the last blood donation of James Harrison. Surrounded by a bank of television cameras and grateful mothers with babies whom James had helped save with his donations, Harrison donates his blood under the watchful and benevolent supervision of nurses Lizzie Thynne and Robyn Barlow. ‘James thinks his donations are the same as anybody else,’ a director of the blood center said, standing next to James. “But he’s a national hero.” James demurred, saying, ‘no, no, no. it’s just something I can do. Its one of my talents. Probably my only talent.”

At the time of this writing facing unprecedented times. The wrath of a pandemic called COVID-19 has engulfed us in its wake and set us back not just economically, but more dangerously, morally as well. We seem to be helpless in not just countering the rapid spread of this disease but are also rendered incapable of nurturing a universal bonding in this period of crisis. Riven by racial tension and divided by a chasm of hatred, mankind seems to be at a crossroad. There is a deepening erosion of faith and a severe loss of hope. The crying need of the hour is for an epiphanic John Gorman to take the SARS-COVID 2 virus head on and an effervescent James Harrison to restore the faith in humanity. Hope we manage to get them booth sooner rather than later.

Meanwhile we can all once again be immensely grateful to Ms. Julian Guthrie for her marvelous efforts in bringing to worldwide notice, one of Earth’s greatest collective altruistic endeavour.

(Good Blood: A Doctor, donor and the incredible breakthrough that saved millions of babies by Julian Guthrie is published by Abrams Press and will be released on the 8th of September 2020.)

Emotive story combined with good science writing

I enjoyed this book. Although ostensibly a book about medicine, it is really more the story of two men, each working in their own way to solve the Rh dilemma. But happily, the book doesn't minimize the role of all the other people involved. The book is powerfully emotional, not a cold recitation of facts and is written more like fiction than nonfiction. When the book does discuss the intricacies of the Rh dilemma, all explanations are very clearly laid out. The book takes detours along the way, but there is always a relevant payoff. Overall this is a great book and well worth reading.
Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book visa Netgalley for review purposes.

Reminiscent of The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester, this book was a fascinating account of a disease that is virtually unheard of now in the privileged West but once caused the heartbreaking deaths of many newborn infants across the world. In short, if a baby's Rhesus blood type was a mismatch against the mother's Rhesus blood type, the result was possibly catastrophic causing the baby to die in infancy. As doctors raced to find a cure for this disease, a man in Australia committed himself to giving blood every fortnight after himself have life-saving blood transfusions as a teenager. Unbeknown to him, the antibodies in his blood saved the lives of millions of babies with this disease.
Julian Guthrie was gifted at finding the stories behind what might have been a difficult science lesson to explain. She has brought to life the lives of two Australian men who have never met but who both contributed their life to saving the lives of infants around the world. I enjoyed hearing about this life changing, radical discovery. Perhaps the book was longer than it needed to have been; at times there was added detail that took away from the central story and seemed unnecessary. Otherwise, I can recommend it!