Paper short abstract:

Jehovah's Witnesses refuse blood transfusions on religious grounds while they simultaneously insist on obtaining the best possible medical treatment. Drawing on an ethnographic research among the JW patients, the paper analyzes the intertwining of biomedical with religious discourse and practices.

Paper long abstract:

Despite their long held animosity of vaccinations the Jehovah's Witnesses, a millenarian movement established in the U.S. in the 1870s and present in Germany since the 1900s, expressed little initial interest in health and sickness. Nonetheless, in 1945, the organizations flagship magazine Watchtower, citing biblical references, denounced the movement of blood between bodies as "God-dishonoring" making them the best known religious proponents of the "no blood transfusion" policy. Interestingly, Witnesses are not against biomedicine as such: they refuse blood transfusions on religious grounds while they simultaneously insist on obtaining the best possible medical treatment. In order to support their religious stance they frequently draw on and utilize biomedical language, in which the newest biomedical results showing possible dangers of blood transfusions are explained, such as the transmission of HIV, syphilis, or hepatitis. They also make an efficient usage of modern medical technology such as blood salvaging machines and the heart-lung machine. Drawing on an ongoing (to be completed in April 2012) ethnographic research among the Witness patients in Berlin, the paper analyzes the intertwining of biomedical with religious discourse and practices that may shed a new light on the relationship between religion and (secular)biomedicine.