This article investigates the idea around infection in social science, focusing on a treatise on blood transfusion by Richard Titmuss, “Gift Relationship” in 1970. According to Titumuss, blood had been an important theme for human beings and thus for anthropology, but it could be treated in a more scientific way. Around 1960s, efficient blood supply was of urgent necessity, owing to its serious shortage in hospitals. Blood banks with and without profit had been established, and some economic theorists extended their research into the area of health and welfare. But more fundamentally, it had already been indicated that the idea of welfare to exterminate by sanitization the infection as a sign of poverty, parallel to market mechanism, had limit and contradiction.
Titmuss emphasized the superiority of given blood without profit to that with profit. He collected data of blood donors in the UK, USA, and some other countries, and analyzed that blood was supplied in many cases by those who belonged to lower income class and that the blood supplied without profit was much less infected than that supplied with profit. Though his conclusion was refuted by Kenneth Arrow who scrutinized it, Titmuss’ elaboration on infection through blood transfusion gave considerable influence both on theory and on practice.
