Organ transplantation is one of the most dramatic interventions in modern   medicine. Since the 1950s thousands of people have lived with 'new' hearts,   kidneys, lungs, corneas, and other organs and tissues transplanted into   their bodies. From the beginning, though, there was simply a problem:   surgeons often encountered shortages of people willing and able to give   their organs and tissues. To overcome this problem, they often brokered   financial arrangements. Yet an ethic of gift exchange coexisted with the 'commodification of the body'. The same duality characterized the field of   blood transfusion, which was essential to the development of modern surgery. 

Organ transplantation is one of the most dramatic interventions in modern medicine. Since the 1950s thousands of people have lived with 'new' hearts,   kidneys, lungs, corneas, and other organs and tissues transplanted into   their bodies. From the beginning, though, there was simply a problem:   surgeons often encountered shortages of people willing and able to give   their organs and tissues. To overcome this problem, they often brokered   financial arrangements. Yet an ethic of gift exchange coexisted with the   'commodification of the body'. The same duality characterized the field of   blood transfusion, which was essential to the development of modern surgery.  This book will be the first to bring together the histories of blood   transfusion and organ transplantation. It will show how these two fields   redrew the lines between self and non-self, the living and the dead, and   humans and animals. Drawing on newspapers, magazines, legal cases, films and   the papers and correspondence of physicians and surgeons, Lederer will   challenge the assumptions of some bioethicists and policymakers that popular   fears about organ transplantation necessarily reflect timeless human   concerns and preoccupations with the body. She will show how notions of the   body- intact, in parts, living and dead- are shaped by the particular   culture in which they are embedded.

    Contents:

  1. Living on the Island of Doctor Moreau: Surgeons and the Body
  2. Miracles of Resurrection: Reinventing Blood Transfusion
  3. Banking on the Body
  4. Lost Boundaries: Race, Blood and Bodies
  5. Are You My Type?: Blood Groups, Individuality and Identity
  6. Medicalizing Miscegenation?: Transplantation and Race
  7. Religious Bodies
  8. Organ Recital: Transplantation and Transfusion in Historical Perspective