Good Blood

The New York Times bestselling author of How to Make a Spaceship presents the remarkable, uplifting story of a life-saving medical breakthrough.Good Blood is a powerful narrative nonfiction tale of discovery and invention, the progress and pitfalls of medicine, and the everyday heroics that came to fundamentally change the health of women and babies. This is the gripping tale of the race to cure Rh disease, a horrible blood disease that 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. 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.