In Chapter 4, we provided statistics of blood donors for the country as a whole and on a regional basis from the establishment of the National Blood Transfusion Service in 1948 to 1970. They told us nothing, however, about the characteristics of the donor population by age, sex, marital status, income group and other attributes.

At the local donor session and at the regional level, the staff of the Service acquired much knowledge and experience concerning the recruitment of donors of different ages and social groups. But, apart from one or two ad hoc and unpublished inquiries,1 no attempt was made before 1970 to fund this information in statistical form. Only impressionistic answers can be given in response to the question ‘Who gives blood?’

One of the reasons for this lack of inquiry is that the Service, as the national administrative agency responsible for the supply of blood and blood products, has never consciously been aware of a shortage or an impending shortage of potential donors. There have, therefore, been no internal or external pressures for more systematic information about the characteristics of those who give and those who do not give blood. Yet the Service has been in a unique position as the sole national agency to collect and analyse data on a national scale compared with the variety and multiplicity of agencies in the United States and many other countries. But why collect such information? In the opinion of the writer, no public service should be required as a matter of routine administrative processes to pile up, Kafka-like, vast masses of statistics just to satisfy computers and those who feed computers.

There must be then some reason or reasons; someone must be asking questions; scientific, technical, historical, policy or administrative questions. In the present instance, as earlier chapters have indicated, a variety of questions have been thrown up about the characteristics of blood donors; questions concerning the gift relationship, about attitudes, motives and values, about human blood as a service-bond or as a commercial commodity, and questions that need answers if blood transfusion services are viewed as systems of social redistribution.