Removing an organ from one (typically dead) body and placing it in another living body challenges our most foundational ideas about boundaries between self and other, individual and social identity, life and death, health and illness. But despite these transgressions, organ transplant is a celebrated and relatively common procedure. Transplant Fictions brings together a diverse set of cultural representations to understand how we have overcome the profound ideological violations represented by organ exchange in order to reimagine the concept and practice as technological and moral victories. From the plots of horror stories and sci-fi novels to sentimental romances and feel-good media reports of stranger donation, this cultural study offers a nuanced portrait of the conceptual journey of organ exchange from strange and terrible to the “gift of life.”

The memoirs of an transplant physician trace his career and family life, presenting an argument for the benefits of organ transplant while offering insight into how politics and personalities contribute to the business of organ transplant and its related science. Reprint. (Health & Fitness)

Accept a transplant of a pig's heart, or die? That's what Cameron has to decide ... The story: Cameron is offered the chance to have a highly experimental and controversial operation which might save his life. But replacing his heart with one from a pig brings not only medical risk, it places Cameron at the eye of a storm of controversy. Medical ethics, the role of the press and the right to privacy are all brought into vivid focus in this gripping read. Themes: medical ethics; disability; the experience of growing up; animal rights; the individual and society; the media; death. Multicultural Suitable for KS 3/4 (P7-S4)

Transplantation Gothic is a shadow cultural history of transplantation, as mediated through medical writing, science fiction, life writing and visual arts in a Gothic mode, from the nineteenth-century to the present. The works explore the experience of donor/suppliers, recipients and practitioners, and simultaneously express transfer-related suffering and are complicit in its erasure. Examining texts from Europe, North America and India, the book resists exoticising predatorial tissue economies and considers fantasies of harvest as both product and symbol of structural ruination under neoliberal capitalism. In their efforts to articulate bioengineered hybridity, these works are not only anxious but speculative. The book will be of interest to academics and students researching Gothic studies, science fiction, critical medical humanities and cultural studies of transplantation.

"This book is only for people who like joy, absurdity, passion, genius, dry wit, youthful folly, amusing historical arcana, or telescopes." —Rivka Galchen, author of Little Labors and American Innovations In 1666, an astronomer makes a prediction shared by no one else in the world: at the stroke of noon on June 30 of that year, a solar eclipse will cast all of Europe into total darkness for four seconds. This astronomer is rumored to be using the longest telescope ever built, but he is also known to be blind—and not only blind, but incapable of sight, both his eyes having been plucked out some time before under mysterious circumstances. Is he mad? Or does he, despite this impairment, have an insight denied the other scholars of his day? These questions intrigue the young Gottfried Leibniz—not yet the world-renowned polymath who would go on to discover calculus, but a nineteen-year-old whose faith in reason is shaky at best. Leibniz sets off to investigate the astronomer’s claim, and over the three hours remaining before the eclipse occurs—or fails to occur—the astronomer tells the scholar the haunting and hilarious story behind his strange prediction: a tale that ends up encompassing kings and princes, family squabbles, obsessive pursuits, insanity, philosophy, art, loss, and the horrors of war. Written with a tip of the hat to the works of Thomas Bernhard and Franz Kafka, The Organs of Sense stands as a towering comic fable: a story about the nature of perception, and the ways the heart of a loved one can prove as unfathomable as the stars.

For readers of Henry Marsh's Do No Harm, Paul A. Ruggieri's Confessions of a Surgeon, and Atul Gawande's Better, a pioneering surgeon shares memories from a life in one of surgery’s most demanding fields The 1980s marked a revolution in the field of organ transplants, and Bud Shaw, M.D., who studied under Tom Starzl in Pittsburgh, was on the front lines. Now retired from active practice, Dr. Shaw relays gripping moments of anguish and elation, frustration and reward, despair and hope in his struggle to save patients. He reveals harshly intimate moments of his medical career: telling a patient's husband that his wife has died during surgery; struggling to complete a twenty-hour operation as mental and physical exhaustion inch closer and closer; and flying to retrieve a donor organ while the patient waits in the operating room. Within these more emotionally charged vignettes are quieter ones, too, like growing up in rural Ohio, and being awakened late at night by footsteps in the hall as his father, also a surgeon, slipped out of the house to attend to a patient in the ER. In the tradition of Mary Roach, Jerome Groopman, Eric Topol, and Atul Gawande, Last Night in the OR is an exhilarating, fast-paced, and beautifully written memoir, one that will captivate readers with its courage, intimacy, and honesty.

Against a global backdrop of wartime suffering and postwar hope, Borrowing Life gathers the personal histories of the men and women behind the team that enabled and performed the modern medical miracle of the world's first successful organ transplant. "An extraordinary work. Shelley Fraser Mickle has not only provided a detailed, fascinating documentation of the world's first successful organ transplant, but she has also painted the lives of those involved--doctors, patients, family members--so vividly that the reader is completely enthralled and emotionally invested in their grieved losses as well as their successes. The result is a beautiful tribute to medical science as well as to humanity." Jill McCorkle, NYT bestselling author of Life After Life "Working with Dr. Moore, Dr. Murray and Dr, Vandam to create the painting commemorating their historic operation and the research leading up to it was the greatest adventure of my artistic career. Having my painting on the cover of Borrowing Life renews that excitement, for I know what grand adventure is waiting for the reader." Joel Babb, artist "I was so very pleased to be involved with Shelley as she wrote her captivating, compelling book. I only wish that Ron could be here with me to read it." Cynthia Herrick, wife of the first successful organ transplant donor "Had these men and women not worked diligently to save the life of Charles Woods, I and my 5 brothers and 3 sisters, would not have been born. Charles Woods and Miriam Woods are my parents. It is thrilling to read Ms Mickle's book as it closely mirrors the stories our dad and mom shared with us as children. The amazing thing is that as a disfigured war hero, our dad embraced his appearance as a badge of honor." David Woods Performed at Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in 1954, the first successful kidney transplant was the culmination of years of grit, compassion, and the pursuit of excellence by a remarkable medical team--Nobel Prize-winning surgeon Joseph Murray, his boss and fellow surgeon Francis Moore, and British scientist and fellow Nobel laureate Peter Medawar. Drawing on the lives of these members of the Greatest Generation, Borrowing Life creates a compelling narrative that begins in wartime and tracks decades of the ups and downs, personal and professional, of these inspiring men and their achievements, which continue to benefit humankind in so many ways.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks meets Get Out in this “startling…powerful” (Kirkus Reviews) investigation of racial inequality at the core of the heart transplant race. In 1968, Bruce Tucker, a black man, went into Virginia’s top research hospital with a head injury, only to have his heart taken out of his body and put into the chest of a white businessman. Now, in The Organ Thieves, Pulitzer Prize–nominated journalist Chip Jones exposes the horrifying inequality surrounding Tucker’s death and how he was used as a human guinea pig without his family’s permission or knowledge. The circumstances surrounding his death reflect the long legacy of mistreating African Americans that began more than a century before with cadaver harvesting and worse. It culminated in efforts to win the heart transplant race in the late 1960s. Featuring years of research and fresh reporting, along with a foreword from social justice activist Ben Jealous, “this powerful book weaves together a medical mystery, a legal drama, and a sweeping history, its characters confronting unprecedented issues of life and death under the shadows of centuries of racial injustice” (Edward L. Ayers, author of The Promise of the New South).

What do you do when you have to choose between saving a life or saving yourself? Renowned cardiac surgeon Dr. Athan Carras’s first concern has always been the welfare of his patients. Then he’s approached by the very wealthy and even more powerful Terry Flynnt—a man who is used to getting what he wants, no matter what. Flynnt’s son is dying, and his only chance of survival is to receive a donor heart—one that Terry intends to obtain by whatever means necessary. Athan is immediately opposed to performing an illegal and immoral operation, but Flynnt is not about to let that stop him. Now, caught in the crosshairs of a man with unlimited means and influence, Athan finds his own life—and the lives of those he loves—being torn apart. And he will have to decide how far he’s willing to go, and what he is willing to sacrifice…

The late 1970s to the mid-1980s, a period commonly referred to as the post-Mao cultural thaw, was a key transitional phase in the evolution of Chinese science fiction. This period served as a bridge between science-popularization science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s and New Wave Chinese science fiction from the 1990s into the twenty-first century. Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw surveys the field of Chinese science fiction and its multimedia practice, analysing and assessing science fiction works by well-known writers such as Ye Yonglie, Zheng Wenguang, Tong Enzheng, and Xiao Jianheng, as well as the often-overlooked tech–science fiction writers of the post-Mao thaw. Exploring the socio-political and cultural dynamics of science-related Chinese literature during this period, Hua Li combines close readings of original Chinese literary texts with literary analysis informed by scholarship on science fiction as a genre, Chinese literary history, and media studies. Li argues that this science fiction of the post-Mao thaw began its rise as a type of government-backed literature, yet it often stirred up controversy and received pushback as a contentious and boundary-breaking genre. Topically structured and interdisciplinary in scope, Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw will appeal to both scholars and fans of science fiction.