Boel Berner is a sociologist, historian, and professor emerita at Linköping University in Sweden. In her research she investigates the character and power of expertise, historically and today. She has studied education and work, the gendered nature of technical knowledge, household modernization, and issues of risk. Her current work is oriented towards the history of medicine. It focuses, besides questions of blood donation and transfusion, on the politics of blood group analysis in the interwar years.

• Prologue; Introduction: 'The mighty influence of strange blood'; Using the blood of others; Ambitions and connections; Blood on the battlefield; Blood for the lungs; Asylum experiments; Proofs and refutations; Transgressions; Winding up; Epilogue: The return; Notes; Sources and Literature; Acknowledgements; Index of Places; Index of Names.

»Insgesamt hat die schwedische Medizinhistorikerin eine interessante und lesenswerte Studie vorgelegt, der [...] das Verdienst gebührt, ein ansonsten nur randständig wahrgenommenes Thema quellen- und facettenreich auszuleuchten.«