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Recommended Books on Organ Transplantation
Amanda's Gift A guide for parents with seriously ill children. A review of the emotional and financial impact of a child's seven year fight with cancer and other illness, including a liver transplant. A detailed summary of the health care system will help enlighten many parents who are unfamiliar with the complexities of insurance companies and large hospital networks. Amanda's Gift touches on all areas of life as a caregiver, including the impact on faith and marriage.
Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self Strange Harvest illuminates the wondrous yet disquieting medical realm of organ transplantation by drawing on the voices of those most deeply involved: transplant recipients, clinical specialists, and the surviving kin of deceased organ donors. In this rich and deeply engaging ethnographic study, anthropologist Lesley Sharp explores how these parties think about death, loss, and mourning, especially in light of medical taboos surrounding donor anonymity. As Sharp argues, new forms of embodied intimacy arise in response, and the riveting insights gleaned from her interviews, observations, and descriptions of donor memorials and other transplant events expose how patients and donor families make sense of the transfer of body parts from the dead to the living. For instance, all must grapple with complex yet contradictory clinical assertions of death as easily detectable and absolute; nevertheless, transplants are regularly celebrated as forms of rebirth, and donors as living on in others' bodies. New forms of sociality arise, too: recipients and donors' relatives may defy sanctions against communication, and through personal encounters strangers are transformed into kin. Sharp also considers current experimental research efforts to develop alternative sources for human parts, with prototypes ranging from genetically altered animals to sophisticated mechanical devices. These future trajectories generate intriguing responses among both scientists and transplant recipients as they consider how such alternatives might reshape established--yet unusual--forms of embodied intimacy.
Every Second Counts: The Race to Transplant the First Human Heart In the tradition of The Right Stuff comes the true story of four men locked in a race to transplant the first human heart--a riveting tale of surgical daring, unyielding ambition, and scientific adventure.
Many people remember the beaming face of Christiaan Barnard, the South African surgeon, after he performed the first human heart transplant, and captured the world's imagination. It was a stunning achievement, but he was not alone. In truth it was a four-way race, a fierce struggle fraught with passionate rivalry. The other three surgeons-Adrian Kantrowitz, Norman Shumway, and Richard Lower-were giants in the field, and by early December 1967 they and Barnard were each poised to snatch the victor's laurels. Each had spent years perfecting techniques that would lead to a successful heart transplant; each had monitored his chosen patient's condition, watching the clock, hoping a donor would be found in time.
Some of these men were friends; others were enemies. Only one of them would be the first.
From a dank, underequipped hospital in Cape Town to a cramped lab in San Francisco, the surgeons worked their own individual miracles to prolong their patients' lives, testing the limits of science, and nature itself. Like the classics of medical adventure-from James Watson's The Double Helix to John Barry's The Great Influenza-Every Second Counts is an unforgettable story of not only competition and fame, but of life and death.
Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies: Death, Mourning, and Scientific Desire in the Realm of Human Organ Transfer (Leonard Hastings Schoff Lectures)
In the United States today, the human body defines a lucrative site of reusable parts, ranging from whole organs to minuscule and even microscopic tissues. Although the medical practices that enable the transfer of parts from one body to another most certainly relieve suffering and extend lives, they have also irrevocably altered perceptions of the cultural values assigned to the body. Organ transfer is rich terrain to investigate& mdash;especially in the American context, where sophisticated technological interventions have significantly shaped understandings of health and well-being, suffering, and death. In Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies, Lesley Sharp probes the ideological assumptions underlying the transfer of body parts, the social significance of donors' deaths, and the medico-scientific desires surrounding complex forms of body repair. Sharp also considers the experimental realm, in which nonhuman species and artificial devices present further opportunities for recovery and for controversy. A compelling scientific investigation and social critique, Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies explores the pervasive, and at times pernicious, practices shaping American biomedicine in the twenty-first century.
The Gift of Life 2: Surviving the Waiting List and Liver Transplantation Seventeen years after a successful liver transplant, David Yomtoob once again found himself fighting for his life against the backdrop of organ waiting lists and a valiant team of doctors and nurses working to keep him alive while he waited.
Only 12 years old when his first liver failed with advanced Wilsons disease, David was among the first to receive a transplanted liver in 1981. He led a normal life when suddenly, 17 years later, that liver began to fail. Three years and four transplants centers later, David arrived home again with a new liver, but only after he and his family had been tested by the challenges faced by every transplant family on the waiting list. According to the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), nearly 90,000 people are waiting for donated organs today and every 13 minutes a new name is added to the list. Every 13 minutes another familys life is thrown into turmoil as they begin the waiting process with the hope that their journey will end in life and not in death. As each patients name is added to the waiting list, a number of unforeseen challenges await. The Gift of Life 2 was written to assist patients and their families in managing those challenges: Which transplant center is best for the patient? How does the waiting list work? How does a patient communicate with medical personnel most effectively to manage their treatment? Who is the best candidate to be a living related organ donor? What are the various religious positions on organ donation and transplantation? Where does one find financial, emotional, and spiritual support during the waiting period? How can a layperson understand the medical tests? What can go wrong? Most importantly, how can a loved one be kept alive long enough to receive a transplant? Parichehr Yomtoob, Davids mother and the co-author (with Ted Schwarz) in 1986 of The Gift of Life, the story of Davids first transplant, is an activist and educator for organ donation and transplantation. She has co-authored The Gift of Life 2 with her daughter-in-law Laura Yomtoob and Deborah Weppler, one of our countrys most experienced transplant nurses. Between them, they answer all of the questions patients and their families will have before, during, and after transplantation. This book gives inspiration and purpose to those awaiting transplant, as well as those contemplating organ donation. It will also provide valuable insights to doctors, medical students, nurses, and other hospital personnel, along with members of the clergy, and the families and friends of transplant patients.
Raising the Dead: Organ Transplants, Ethics, and Society Perhaps no medical breakthrough in the twentieth century is more spectacular, more hope-giving, or more fraught with ethical questions than organ transplantation. Each year some 25,000 Americans are pulled back from the brink of death by receiving vital new organs. Another 5,000 die while waiting for them. And what distinguishes these two groups has become the source of one of our thorniest ethical questions. In Raising the Dead, Ronald Munson offers a vivid, often wrenchingly dramatic account of how transplants are performed, how we decide who receives them, and how we engage the entire range of tough issues that arise because of them. Each chapter begins with a detailed account of a specific case--Mickey Mantle's controversial liver transplant, for example--followed by careful analysis of its surrounding ethical questions (the charges that Mantle received special treatment because he was a celebrity, the larger problems involving how organs are allocated, and whether alcoholics should have an equal claim on donor livers). In approaching transplant ethics through specific cases, Munson reminds us of the complex personal and emotional dimension that underlies such issues. The book also ranges beyond our present capabilities to explore the future possibilities in xenotransplantation (transplanting animal organs into humans) and stem cell technology that would allow doctors to grow new organs from the patient's own cells. Based on extensive scientific research, but written with a novelist's eye for the human condition, Raising the Dead shows readers the reality of organ transplantation now, the possibility of what it may become, and how we might respond to the ethical challenges it forces us to confront.
Bone Regeneration and Repair: Biology and Clinical Applications This collection of articles by leading orthopedic and craniofacial surgeons and researchers comprehensively reviews the biology of bone formation and repair, the basic science of autologous bone graft, allograft, bone substitutes, and growth factors, and explore their clinical application in patients with bone repair problems.
Clinical Management of the Transplant Patient This book provides a comprehensive overview of solid organ transplantation for residents, fellows and other personnel working in Transplant Units. It addresses the clinical management of the transplant patient from pre-transplant evaluation through surgery to outpatient follow-up. Emphasis is given to the information required for day to day management. This information is presented in a concise and practical format for easy access.
Now Caitlin Can: A donated organ helps a child get well. Freddie learns his little sister Caitlin's only chance for a normal life is a kidney transplant. In time, a suitable kidney is donated and Caitlin undergoes the surgery that changes her life.
This picture book is based on a true story of a child organ recipient. The colorful cut-paper and fabric illustrations show the before-and-after of the second chance made possible by a compassionate deceased donor.
Kidney for Sale by Owner: Human Organs, Transplantation, and the Mark During the past ten years over 4,600 people have died annually in the United States while waiting for organ transplants. In 2003, 83,000 patients waited for transplantation--but only 20,000 patients received them. While everyone seems to agree that this is a national tragedy, bold initiatives to address the problem--such as creating a fee-based and regulated market for organ transplantation--have been fiercely rejected by the federal government and the medical community. But why? If most Americans accept the notion that the market is the most efficient means to distribute resources, why should body parts be exempt? Bioethicist Mark Cherry contends that not only is the market a legitimate means to distribute body parts, but that this approach is actually more just--and more compatible with many Western religious and philosophical traditions--than the current charity-based system now in place. Cherry carefully examines arguments against a market for body parts, made by such figures as John Locke and Immanuel Kant and Thomas Aquinas, and shows these claims to be steeped in myth, oversimplification, and bad logic. Taking his cue from the philosopher Robert Nozick, Cherry contends that in regard to body parts such core values as equality, liberty, altruism, social solidarity, human dignity, and, ultimately, improved health care are more successfully supported by a market rather than through its prohibition. Rather than focus on the purported human exploitation and "moral repugnance" of selling organs, he says, we should focus on saving lives.
© 2004-2008 Organ Transplantation Research Today. All Rights Reserved.
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