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reaffirmation of an enriched self. Each text in this chapter resists the trend in transplant commentary to downplay any sense of the received tissue as alien or to elide recipients’ imaginative work or distress. The texts figure recipient experience variously in terms of mutual enfleshment across shared tissue, possession by multiple non-human forces, and an evacuation of self and agency altogether, in crises both affective and ontological. Ultimately, the works unsettle not only a distinction between self and other but also the idea of transplantation surgery as a time
) Let us suppose the case of a young man, intellectual, talented and perhaps, with great aptitude in surgery, but nevertheless at heart a sexual pervert. He begins practice and soon acquires a reputation as a skilful surgeon. But he feels, stirring within him, sadistic tendencies which he cannot or will not repress. He looks about him for a means of
intellectually and obsessively on death … morbid anatomy and the obsessions of the curiosity cabinet thus pre-empted life and the living’. 8 In the culture of the Enlightenment, Stafford explains that ‘metaphors of decoding … analysing, fathoming, permeated ways of thinking about, and representing, all branches of knowledge from religion to philosophy …, archaeology to surgery’. 9 There are profound implications of Blake
’Key sisters, his successor as the pre-eminent practitioner of induced sleep in Victorian popular consciousness enjoyed a perceptibly more favourable status on account of his scepticism and the relative accessibility of the theory which lay behind his public and clinical demonstrations. James Braid was a Scot, educated at the University of Edinburgh, with experience in surgery and – significantly – ophthalmology
mandating ‘irreversible’ cessation of cardiac function, since resuscitation is not only not attempted but has to be actively prevented during surgery, as I discuss shortly. 62 There is also a paradox when a patient is declared dead on the grounds of irreversible cardiac failure yet that same heart is retrieved and successfully transplanted. 63 Several strong supporters of DCD state that we should use ‘not a literal definition of irreversible’. 64 Some physicians have raised concerns about pain due to uncertainties about neurological status at point of procurement
According to legend, in the sixth century CE Saints Cosmas and Damien miraculously replaced the diseased leg of a white Christian man with the leg of an Ethiopian man, recently deceased. In medieval and Renaissance art the latter man is usually a mystery. Mark Alice Durant says, ‘While the biographical record of Cosmas and Damian has been preserved and embellished over the centuries … nothing … is known of the life of the Ethiopian … He is a shadow, a dark mirror to reflect the European imagination.’ 1 In one fourteenth-century depiction of this surgery, for
influence how transfer is administered and understood both within and outside healthcare institutions. Such discursive work is central to the fictions of this chapter. Whilst previous chapters imagine corporate profit gleaned from the comatose or vulnerable ( Chapter 2 ), or clinical labour informed by long-term structural inequality and slow violence ( Chapter 3 ), this chapter explores dystopian fictions imagining juridical state-sanctioned surgery or execution, in which an explicit hierarchy of lives prevails. In a medico-juridical nexus, hospitals become prisons
transnational predation and explores how predatorial harvest is not only a function of illegal markets but also a product and symbol of complex networks of structural ruination. The juxtaposition of ‘transplantation’ and ‘Gothic’ may seem inappropriate, even grotesque. Transplantation surgery is, after all, astounding and life-saving – as Sharp admits, it ‘may well be viewed as the quintessential example of millennial medicine, for we have remained in awe of its accomplishments since the mid-twentieth century and into the twenty-first’. 9 The Chair of the UK Donation
countries have made it illegal to sell most human material; there are exceptions, such as Iran where living kidney sale is legal, and the market in blood in the US. Yet even in countries where organs cannot be legally sold, transfer is a nexus for significant cash and capital flow. Economically speaking, transfer is exceptionally generative in the labour that maintains procurement allocation and distribution networks, the cost of the surgery, the cost of ongoing medical surveillance, ongoing pharmaceutical profit from lifelong immunosuppression, and the cost of treating
for all of us, a dark sky is assuredly a poisonous and depressing power, which neither surgery nor medicine can resist. The difference to me between nature as she is now, and as she was ten years ago, is as great as between Lapland and Italy, and the total loss of comfort in morning and evening sky, the most difficult to resist of all spiritual hostility. (Fleming 1887 : 88) Ruskin's admission of his diminished consolation in nature can be read in tandem with his obsession with