La Piel Research Articles

Escrituras postseculares: sedimentos de la religión en la narrativa española (1950-2010) by Daniel García-Donoso

Reviewed by: Escrituras postseculares: sedimentos de la religión en la narrativa española (1950-2010) by Daniel García-Donoso José Patiño-Romero Escrituras postseculares: sedimentos de la religión en la narrativa española (1950-2010) Biblioteca Nueva, 2018 By Daniel García-Donoso The religious politics of Early modern counter-reformation, the Civil War and franquismo haunts the novels that are the object of this study. García-Donoso documents how Spanish fiction, in a world that seems to have replaced institutionalized religion with capitalist speculation, re-deploys this legacy with caution. Escrituras postseculares responds to a perceived lack of critical approaches to religion in contemporary Spanish culture (11), outlining the emergence of a non-dogmatic "postsecularism." It analyzes the reconfigurations of Catholic tropes, which he treats as "sediments," a spatial metaphor he borrows from Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of the re-activation of tradition (21). Experimental, historical, crime and (pre) crisis novels perform an (implied or explicit) critique of the Catholic Church. At the same time, they reconfigure spiritual practices like confession, reconciliation and humility, which become narrative devices. The author's exhaustive research maps out these historical re-sedimentations through compelling syntheses of philosophical, historical, and literary criticism, such as Noel Valis' Sacred Realism: Religion and the Imagination in Modern Spanish Narrative (2010). The introduction provides a helpful, extensive survey of twentieth century critics, like Lukacs and Auerbach, correlating the theory of western "secularization" with the development of the modern novel. Each chapter starts with an extensive and relevant survey of the political and social context of how novelists responded to the consequences of state-sponsored Spanish Catholicism. Chapter One, "Laboratorios de lo Sagrado," describes how experimental novels in the 60s and early 70s demanded active participation from their intellectual reader in "revealing" and reimagining their painful reality in the context of weakened Francoist Catholicism. Fragmentos del Apocalipsis by Gonzalo Torrente-Ballester is a parody of genres, especially Apocalyptic literature, which proclaims its status as a self-sufficient discourse. Saul ante Samuel by Juan Benet deploys excessive allusions to the Old Testament to the point of emptying out their referentiality. The Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary is a narrative technique in the late experimental novel Cristo versus Arizona by Camilo José Cela. This constant leitmotif would preserve readers from "sin." Chapter Two, "Heterodoxa historia de Miguel Delibes," representing an aspect of sixteenth-century Spain's social life only documented in inquisitorial records, is the most relevant for early modernists like this reviewer. For García-Donoso, as opposed to the experimental novel and its exclusive intellectual public, the historical fiction that emerged with the Transición responds to the general reading public's need to re-imagine the past to build a better future. In El hereje, Cipriano turns into a successful businessperson and enters Lutheran circles in Valladolid after his clandestine erotic relationship with his maid/maternal figure was discovered and prohibited, resonating with the prohibition of Protestantism. Cipriano compares his new Lutheran community, an intimate fraternal space, to early prosecuted Christian groups. In his Inquisitorial Auto de Fé, after the confession is shown as an incriminatory practice, his cathartic death by burning resembles Christ in the calvary. The point of view of the public witnessing the execution coincides with the readers' point of view, leading them to question the Spanish Catholic identity. [End Page 204] The novels analyzed in Chapter Three, "Éxtasis del Capital en la novela policíaca española" parody how spiritual exercises that seek evidence to explain mysteries are compared with detective work. In Los misterios de Madrid by Antonio Muñoz Molina, Lorencito is an ad hoc detective hired under false pretenses to investigate the robbery of El Cristo de la Greña. The image's lighting turns on with a coin of 25 pesetas, coined in 1990 for the 1992's anniversary of the "encounter of two worlds." Also, the orgasm at a sex shop is described as a religious experience, the environment resonating with the description of a Catholic souvenir shop. In La piel del tambor by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Lorenzo Quart is an attractive priest sent by the Vatican to prevent the sale...

ADDRESSING LOSS AND NOSTALGIA: TWO CUBAN DIASPORIC NOVELS OF THE NINETIES

My study analyzes two texts that are essential for understanding the Cuban literary diaspora in the 1990s. By looking at the representation of the migrant experience in both Jesus Diaz's novel La piel y la mascara (1996) and Inventario secreto de La Habana (2004) by Abilio Estevez, I examine their significance for the corpus of diasporic literature that has been central to Cuban society for the past sixty years. My article addresses not only the way in which these works are contextualized as part of a diasporic literature tradition, but also how loss and nostalgia play an influential role in shaping the identity of the migrant subject.

How Pictures Make Bodies and Bodies Make Pictures

This article examines the visual dynamics underlying wrong-body narratives of gender through Lacanian psychoanalytic readings of Annie Leibovitz’s photographs of Caitlyn Jenner for Vanity Fair (2015) and Pedro Almodóvar’s film La piel que habito (Spain/France, 2011). Leibovitz’s photographs, seen as the public culmination of Jenner’s gender transition, and Almodóvar’s fictional film, centered on the forced surgical sex reassignment of one of its characters, both comment on the role of technically produced images in constructing visually articulated bodily materiality as central to gender. Staged in Jenner’s domestic space, often before mirrors that reflect the camera alongside its subject, Lei-bovitz’s photos portray Jenner at the center of complex scenarios of mastery over her image. These images demonstrate an awareness of their constructed nature at the same time as they offer themselves as the optical proof of Jenner’s transition; they reveal and, ostensibly, dominate what Lacan refers to as the fundamental misrecognition at the heart of all scopic scenarios of recognition. Almodóvar’s film imagines the reverse scenario in which the body-as-image exerts violent control over the individual, not only erasing the apparent sex of one of its characters, Vicente, but also, and less tolerably, attempting to erase the absence, or misrecognition, of his body in its status as what Lacan calls “objet a,” or object of desire. The distinct ways in which Leibovitz’s images and Almodóvar’s film theorize the relationship between bodies and images with regard to misrecognition and absence point to the continued necessity of considering the influence of scopic relations in formations of gender identity.

Carcinoma epidermoide de la piel en la enfermedad de Crohn

Carcinoma epidermoide de la piel en la enfermedad de Crohn

¿Olavide en el «Olavide»? Nuevas aportaciones al Atlas de la clínica iconográfica de la piel o dermatosis

¿Olavide en el «Olavide»? Nuevas aportaciones al Atlas de la clínica iconográfica de la piel o dermatosis

Acercamiento a la escritura ensayística de Alfonsina Storni a la luz de la performatividad de género de Judith Butler

Los ensayos Nosotras... y la piel (1919), Las dulces mujeres (1919) y El amor y la mujer (1920) de Alfonsina Storni, publicados en secciones femeninas de prensa, se configuran como textos con un estilo y discurso transgresor que ponen en cuestión los paradigmas androcentristas que definían la subjetividad femenina en la época. A partir de la noción de performatividad de género, propuesta por Judith Butler, se analizan estrategias enunciativas como la ironía y el uso de un seudónimo masculino por medio de las cuales Storni logra desarticular en estos ensayos el discurso prescriptivo que caracterizaba estas secciones y situarse en el terreno de los cuestionamientos sobre la identidad de género.

Electrodermal and behavioral response to emotional Spanish words in native speakers

The present study aimed to validate a Spanish-word database that elicits different levels of emotional response. To control subjects’ engagement to the stimuli, an emotional Stroop task was administered to Spanish-speaking population. In order to assess to which extent valence and emotionality are automatically processed when reading a word, participants’ reaction time was recorded as a complement of their electrodermal response. These measurements were used to rank the words into two different lists, conforming the set of Spanish-words. The reaction time to negative words were only significantly slower to reaction times of positive ones (and not to the neutral ones). We found that words with a negative emotional content elicited higher skin conductance responses (SCR) and longer reaction time than those with neutral and positive emotional content. These findings are consistent with previous literature and therefore supports word’s emotionality of the implemented database. l; Emoción, Stroop emocional; Conductancia de la piel; Población hispano-hablante.

Efectos negativos de la radiación solar sobre la piel

Efectos negativos de la radiación solar sobre la piel

Tracing the Borders of Spanish Horror Cinema and Television ed. by Jorge Marí

Reviewed by: Tracing the Borders of Spanish Horror Cinema and Television ed. by Jorge Marí María C. Fellie Marí, Jorge, ed. Tracing the Borders of Spanish Horror Cinema and Television. Routledge, 2017. Pp. 281. ISBN 978-0-415-34863-8. Jorge Marí's collection of essays entitled Tracing the Borders of Spanish Horror Cinema and Television does just what the title promises, within the timeframe of 1995-2015. The introduction outlines prior media scholarship on Spanish horror and points out the lack of existing work on "the renaissance of the horror genre in Spain" since 1995. The goal of this volume, then, is to explore "at length and in proper detail" significant cinematic and television productions within this period, emphasizing elements that are particularly Spanish, as well as those that are international (2). Part 1, "The (Postmodern) Gothic," contains two essays that examine the gothic characteristics of three films. First, in "Trapped in the House of Mirrors: The Others as a Transnational Gothic Thriller," Santiago Juan-Navarro reads Alejandro Amenábar's film as "more concerned with the formal mastery of a new hybrid genre (the postmodern gothic thriller) than in making political, moral, or historical statements" (18). Hence, Juan-Navarro analyzes the concepts of space, superimposed realities, and "self-conscious" fiction (29) that make The Others an example of the "female gothic," questioning the boundaries between real and fictional worlds through "restraint, innuendo, and suspense" (22). Next, in "Contemporary Spanish Gothic Heroines," Ann Davies studies how Julia in Los ojos de Julia (Guillem Morales) and María in Hierro (Gabe Ibáñez) continue to assert subjectivity in their quest for "contingent meaning" (37). In opposition [End Page 647] to both postmodern and patriarchal "grand narratives" (38), both heroines utilize their senses (sight, touch) to persist in finding out the truth. Both essays in Part 2, "Mothers, Children, Patriarchy, and the Biopolitics of Reproduction," propose new readings of social roles in popular films. Sohyun Lee's compelling and detailed argument in "Monstrous (Re)productions: Mothering Patriarchy on the Spanish Horror Screen" reads the "mother figure" as "(re)productions of female monstrosity [ … ] as a means to convey and maintain a patriarchal discourse" (53). Her examination of Andrés Muschietti's Mama and J. A. Bayona's El orfanato reveals that, although both films incorporate newer models of family social structure, they ultimately portray the mother as a mere "accessory for the father-ruled nuclear family" whose inferior, even "monstrous" status is perpetuated. Following Lee, in "Suspendido en el tiempo: Children and Contemporary Spanish Horror," Maria Pramaggiore considers three films: La habitación del niño (Álex de la Iglesia), No-Do (Elio Quiroga), and La casa muda (Gustavo Hernández). She asserts that the child is an instrument used to scrutinize "dark moments" in twentieth-century Spain and Uruguay, serving to criticize how reproduction was/is used as a political tool (68). In Part 3, entitled "Sound, Vision, Media, and Intermediality," the authors focus on spectators in relation to sight and sound. Samuel Amago's aptly named "Dude, Where's my Phallus?!: Locating the Horror of La piel que habito," starts with a review of horror elements in films leading up to Pedro Almodóvar's horror-centered work (93). In engaging detail, Amago then shows how the main character him/herself becomes a media creation symbolizing male domination and desire, as well as "a metaphor for the future uncertainty of masculinity" (101). Anne Hardcastle's "Why They Film" investigates why fictional filmmakers in "found footage" films continue to record in the face of serious danger. The author concludes that, as with documentaries, the shooting continues in order to "produce documentation, evidence, and testimony," as well as entertainment (119). Martin Barnier's "Sound of Fear in Recent Spanish Films" describes various audio phenomena that heighten fear in the audience and characters in several films: acousmêtre (an unseen voice, 125), computers, video, and other "supernatural" sounds. Barnier suggests that "new technologies" of the 1990s are perceived as audio threats that shift into images in the 2000s. As the longest section with four essays, Part 4, "The [REC] Phenomenon," is itself a testament to the popularity of the series. Several essays...

Más abajo de la piel como contestación al racismo (Más abajo de la piel as a Response to Racism)

Se analiza la poética étnico-cultural de Más abajo de la piel, de Abel Pacheco, para destacar el tránsito de una visión negrista hacia una visión de la negritud. Los cuentos de esta colección apuntan las causas políticas, económicas y culturales del racismo contra negros, chinos e indígenas. Se explicitan los procedimientos discursivos en los que se materializa el racismo, y se señalan las implicaciones sociales e ideológicas derivadas del abordaje de la problemática de los negros. Se ejemplifica la poética de Pacheco con un análisis de cuatro relatos: «Juan Chac», «Fichas», «Vocación» y «Congolí».The ethno-cultural poetics of Más abajo de la piel, by Abel Pacheco, is analyzed in order to emphasize the shift from a “negrista” view toward that of negritude. The stories in this collection point to political, economic and cultural causes of racism against blacks, Chinese and indigenous. Discourse procedures are made explicit where racism materializes, and the social and ideological implications derived from this exploration of the issue regarding blacks are discussed. Pacheco’s poetics is exemplified by a brief analysis of four stories: “Juan Chac,” “Fichas,” “Vocación” and “Congolí.”

Efecto de la carga animal y el tipo de piso sobre el rendimiento, la temperatura de la piel y leucograma en la cría de cerdos

Objetivo. El objetivo de este estudio fue evaluar el rendimiento, las características de termorregulación, y el leucograma de cerdos de engorde, criados en diferentes densidad mantenidos en corrales de piso compactos o en piscinas de poca profundidad. Material y métodos. Treinta y seis cerdos se utilizaron en dos etapas (un total de 72 animalles utilizados). En el primer paso, se analizaron las características zootécnicas (consumo diario de alimento, ganancia de peso y alimento: ganancia) y el espesor de grasa dorsal (P2). En el segundo paso, los mismos análisis se repitieron, además, el análisis de leucograma y temperatura de la piel se realizó en P2 y la región anal, al final del crecimiento y del acabado de fase. Resultados. Se evaluaron las diferencias entre los tratamientos y media. No se encontró efecto del tipo de suelo en fase de crecimiento, pero el uso de la piscina de poca profundidad tuvo un efecto negativo sobre la ganancia y la alimentación: ración de ganancia en la fase de acabado. El aumento de efecto lineal de espesor de grasa dorsal como la tasa media se redujo, así como una menor temperatura de la superficie en la región anal en el tratamiento con piscina de poca profundidad en la fase de acabado. No hubo efecto de los tratamientos y tipo de suelo sobre el Leucograma de los cerdos. Permitiendo más espacio/animal disminuyó el espesor de grasa dorsal. El uso de la piscina de poca profundidad afectó negativamente al rendimiento en la fase de acabado. Conclusiones. El uso de la piscina de poca profundidad afectó el rendimiento de los cerdos de acabado, a pesar de la mejora de termólisis, sin efecto visible en la respuesta inmune celular.

"Salvaje primitiva, como vosotros": Race Camp in Almodóvar's Cinema

This article uses the concepts of camp and spectrality to analyze the representation of blackness in three films by Pedro Almodóvar: Entre tinieblas (1983), Tacones lejanos (1991), and La piel que habito (2011). The project demonstrates that, in each film, colonial stereotypes of black hypersexuality and savagery are initially presented as a campy portrayal of Spanish patriarchy, but are then problematically resignified as a symbol of gender and sexual fluidity. However, because the discourse of blackness in the films recreates a triangular, transatlantic relationship between Spain, Africa and the New World, the campy resignification of colonial stereotypes produces a ghostly ambivalence that the films cannot resolve. Instead, the films reveal themselves to be haunted by the memory of slavery and colonialism, thereby calling attention to the contested role that colonialism and its loss have played in the formation of modern Spanish national identity.

IL-31-induced pruritus in dogs: a novel experimental model to evaluate anti-pruritic effects of canine therapeutics.

BackgroundPruritus is a characteristic clinical sign of allergic skin conditions including atopic dermatitis (AD) in the dog. IL‐31 is a cytokine found in the serum of some dogs with AD and can induce pruritic behaviours in laboratory beagle dogs.Hypothesis/ObjectivesThe objectives were to characterize an IL‐31‐induced pruritus model by evaluating the efficacy of prednisolone, dexamethasone and oclacitinib, and to compare the speed of anti‐pruritic effects of oclacitinib against those of prednisolone and dexamethasone.AnimalsPurpose‐bred beagle dogs were used in all studies.MethodsRandomized, blinded, placebo‐controlled studies were designed to evaluate and compare the anti‐pruritic properties of prednisolone, dexamethasone and oclacitinib following a single intravenous injection of recombinant canine IL‐31. Video surveillance was used to monitor and score pruritic behaviours in study animals.ResultsPrednisolone [0.5 mg/kg, per os (p.o.)] reduced IL‐31‐induced pruritus when given 10 h prior to observation. When the time interval between drug treatment and observation was shortened to 1 h, dexamethasone (0.2 mg/kg, intramuscular) but not prednisolone (0.25 or 0.5 mg/kg, p.o.) reduced IL‐31‐induced pruritus. Oclacitinib (0.4 mg/kg, p.o.) reduced pruritus when given 1, 6, 11 and 16 h prior to the observation period, and the anti‐pruritic activity of oclacitinib was greater when compared to prednisolone and dexamethasone at all time points assessed.Conclusion and clinical importanceThe efficacy of prednisolone, dexamethasone and oclacitinib in the IL‐31‐induced pruritus model gives confidence that this may be a relevant model for acute pruritus associated with allergic dermatitis including AD and can be used to evaluate novel compounds or formulations.

Pedro Almodóvar's La piel que habito: Of Late Style and Erotic Conservatism

In this article, I read Almodóvar's film La piel que habito (2011) as an example of what Edward Said calls late style. However, unlike the perfecting or visionary style of artists' later works, Almodóvar's late style, lacking the counter-cultural ground provided by La movida, the urban movement in post-Francoist Spain, becomes self-referential, not only in the repeated allusions to his earlier films, but also in his readiness to imitate Hollywood's canonical cinematic language. In fact, I argue that La piel que habito maintains an internal dialogue with Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. The avant-garde aura identified with Almodóvar's cinema is often related to La Movida. Yet, as Eduardo Subirats contends in Modernidad y exilio, this cultural movement never attempted to revise the political, social and cultural content remaining from the fascist rule but rather recycled them into a form of cultural transvestism. I argue that, beyond its liberated disguise, Almodóvar's conception of sexuality is ideologically conservative, hinging on an understanding of gender relations that corroborate the tenets of Laura Mulvey's classic critique of the patriarchal gaze in Hollywood narrative cinema. The conservatism unearthed in this article refers to patriarchal conceptions of courtly love developed by Jacques Lacan in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Particularly, I look at the construction of the feminine that results from Almodóvar's erotic conservatism.

Skin gazing: Queer bodies in Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In

Abstract Psychoanalytic theorists argue that the creation of the ego is largely a product of how we perceive the surface of our skin. The horror genre literalizes these moments of skin gazing by centring the plot around the spectacle of cutting skin, where the victim’s body is opened up for the audience’s viewing pleasure. Pedro Almodóvar’s La piel que habito/The Skin I Live In (2011) inverts the classic horror trope of bodily cutting by showcasing a villain who gives his victim impenetrable skin as a way to pacify and torture him. Survival, therefore, depends on the victim’s ability to overcome the horror of living within another skin, even one that is differently gendered. Such transgender narratives bring to horror cinema a way to rethink Freudian and Lacanian concepts of the gaze that structure our affective responses to seeing bodies cut on-screen. In exchange, we might say that cinema brings to these transgender narratives a suturing technology that allows for a layering of bodies with time otherwise unattainable outside the medium of cinema. Instead of trying to separate out the self from the skin it inhabits, we must understand our identity as an interplay between different forms of embodiment.

Yuxtaposición artística en La piel que habito de Pedro Almodóvar: en torno a las obras de Tiziano, Louise Bourgeois, Guillermo Pérez Villalta y Juan Gatti

The Spanish film director Pedro Almodovar tends to use a set of significant details in order to create a network of senses in his films. This feature is also present in the film La piel que habito throughout some artistic works which are closely related to the theme and the plot. This paper analyses the role that some works of some famous artists, such as Tiziano Vecellio, Louise Bourgeois, Gillermo Perez Villalta and Juan Gatti, play in this film. This information helps to recognize how Almodovar modifies both the classical and modern works of art in order to give them new meaning by means of the transformations. Tiziano’s paintings reveal doctor Robert’s desire, whereas Louise Bourgeois’s works show Vera’s desire and her real life as a prisoner. Perez Villalta’s works expose the relationship between Robert and Vera. Juan Gatti’s paintings present the dichotomy of the skin and the ego, the main message of the film. Thus, all the artistic works that appear in La piel que habito refer to the relationship between the two protagonists or their mental world.

Troubling transformations: Pedro Almodóvar’s La piel que habito/The Skin I Live In (2011) and its reception

By analysing audience responses to a Spanish film among French-speaking viewers uploaded on websites and forums, this article examines what happens when adaptation crosses national and cultural boundaries, with specific attention to representations of transgender and gender issues. The case study is La piel que habito/The Skin I Live In (2011) by Pedro Almodóvar. We compare the adaptation to its French source Mygale (Thierry Jonquet, 1984) and consider its use of Les Yeux sans visage/Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju, 1960), and reveal that the originally polemical subject matter in the novel is rendered even more controversial by the film. The audience responses are used to gauge whether such issues ‘matter’ for the film’s Francophone viewers and their implications for Almodóvar’s image among his admirers. We argue that a distinction emerges between the actual portrayal of transgender and gender characters in Almodóvar’s films and their reception, both among critics and audiences, for whom the filmmaker continues to be seen as a champion of LGBTQ identities and experience. The ‘Almodóvar label’, we suggest, shapes the reception of his films to the extent that recognition of his representations of transgender and female subjectivity as polemical is only found among a minority of viewers.

From Leonora

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsElena PoniatowskaElena Poniatowska (Paris, 1932) has published numerous novels, non-fiction books, and testimonial narratives, including La noche de Tlatelolco (1971; Massacre in Mexico, 1975), La piel del cielo (2001; The Skin of the Sky, 2004), and Leonora (2011). Among her many honors, she received the Cervantes prize in 2013.This novelized life of the rare British Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington begins in her childhood home in Lancashire. Her father is an industrial magnate and her mother an Irish grandee. Three younger brothers, a French governess, and an adored nanny populate the nursery, in which Leonora over-identifies with her rocking horse, Tartar, and with the sidhes, Irish fairies, always just out of sight. All will appear in Leonora's future paintings, a wild blend of fantasies and memories, and dreams more powerful than the most extreme and extravagant lived realities.

All that Almodóvar Allows

The links between Almodóvar and Sirk have been noted by many. Reference is made to the career of Douglas Sirk (1897–1987), the emigré German film director whose 1950s melodramas are striking landmarks of the Hollywood cinema. Following general comments on the overlaps of form by two of the cinema’s greatest stylists, attention is paid to one of the pivotal mechanisms in the narrative structures of their films, the sacrifice of one character as the price of survival for another. This key element of some of Sirk’s melodramas, raising questions about irony, circularity, gender and selfhood, also features in various Almodóvar films such as Todo sobre mi madre, Hable con ella, Los abrazos rotos, and La piel que habito.

Reducing Blood Culture Contamination in the Emergency Department: An Interrupted Time Series Quality Improvement Study

Blood culture contamination is a common problem in the emergency department (ED) that leads to unnecessary patient morbidity and health care costs. The study objective was to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of a quality improvement (QI) intervention for reducing blood culture contamination in an ED. The authors developed a QI intervention to reduce blood culture contamination in the ED and then evaluated its effectiveness in a prospective interrupted times series study. The QI intervention involved changing the technique of blood culture specimen collection from the traditional clean procedure to a new sterile procedure, with standardized use of sterile gloves and a new materials kit containing a 2% chlorhexidine skin antisepsis device, a sterile fenestrated drape, a sterile needle, and a procedural checklist. The intervention was implemented in a university-affiliated ED and its effect on blood culture contamination evaluated by comparing the biweekly percentages of blood cultures contaminated during a 48-week baseline period (clean technique) and 48-week intervention period (sterile technique), using segmented regression analysis with adjustment for secular trends and first-order autocorrelation. The goal was to achieve and maintain a contamination rate below 3%. During the baseline period, 321 of 7,389 (4.3%) cultures were contaminated, compared to 111 of 6,590 (1.7%) during the intervention period (p < 0.001). In the segmented regression model, the intervention was associated with an immediate 2.9% (95% confidence interval [CI] = 2.2% to 3.2%) absolute reduction in contamination. The contamination rate was maintained below 3% during each biweekly interval throughout the intervention period. A QI assessment of ED blood culture contamination led to development of a targeted intervention to convert the process of blood culture collection from a clean to a fully sterile procedure. Implementation of this intervention led to an immediate and sustained reduction of contamination in an ED with a high baseline contamination rate.