Organ transplant in Mexico is overwhelmingly a family matter, utterly dependent on kidneys from living relatives—not from stranger donors typical elsewhere. Yet Mexican transplant is also a public affair that is proudly performed primarily in state-run hospitals. In Domesticating Organ Transplant, Megan Crowley-Matoka examines the intimate dynamics and complex politics of kidney transplant, drawing on extensive fieldwork with patients, families, medical professionals, and government and religious leaders in Guadalajara. Weaving together haunting stories and sometimes surprising statistics culled from hundreds of transplant cases, she offers nuanced insight into the way iconic notions about mothers, miracles, and mestizos shape how some lives are saved and others are risked through transplantation. Crowley-Matoka argues that as familial donors render transplant culturally familiar, this fraught form of medicine is deeply enabled in Mexico by its domestication as both private matter of home and proud product of the nation. Analyzing the everyday effects of transplant’s own iconic power as an intervention that exemplifies medicine’s death-defying promise and commodifying perils, Crowley-Matoka illuminates how embodied experience, clinical practice, and national identity produce one another.

Despite starting slowly with some academic jargon about altruism and people's motivations to donate organs, the book quickly takes a right turn and gets interesting. The authors sprinkle little informative tidbits along the way-Asian-Americans constituted only 3.4% of U.S. donors-and bring their points alive through little vignettes when examining the origins of altruism. The authors would make brilliant sales reps: they put forth a convincing argument about what a great humanitarian effort living donation is then patiently explain the evaluation process to reassure readers of the minimal costs. The few downsides are reviewed and discussed-for example, how to deal with family members who do not support the decision to donate or the devastation donors might experience when a recipient dies. Resources, bibliography, and index occupy a full 36 pages, yet for the most part this book escapes the drudgery of a research-laden study and instead reads as a fascinating story about a very human issue. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Organ transplantation is the greatest therapeutic advancement of the second half of the 20th century. Of all medical specialities, the pioneers of transplantation make up the largest number of experts awarded with, or nominated for the Nobel Prize.Over the years, transplantation has fascinated the scientific community as well as the general public for a variety of reasons:• The development of transplantation has involved almost all medical specialities. In the history of medicine, there is perhaps no other example of such extensive co-operation and exchange of knowledge and experience among basic scientists, surgeons and physicians in achieving a common goal.• The progress of transplantation has forced doctors to “rewrite” medical textbooks dealing with a great spectrum of post-transplantation issues, such as the physiology of transplanted organs, the recurrence of initial disease in the transplanted organs, and the complications arising from immunosuppressive drugs, infectious diseases and cancer. Other issues raised concern maternity, child development, geriatric medicine and ethical issues.However, the history of this amazing field of modern medicine has never been thoroughly reported in a detailed textbook. History of Organ and Cell Transplantation covers this area of modern literature. It includes a foreword written by Lady Jean Medawar who is the wife of the late Sir Peter Medawar, Nobel Prize winner and first president of the International Transplantation Society.

Provides information about the science of organ transplantation, its advantages and disadvantages, and the emerging technology of stem cell research that could allow for the creation of new organs ready for transplant.

This second edition of the introduction to the field of organ transplantation provides an excellent overview of the tremendous progress made in recent decades, and gives a clear description of the current status of transplant surgery for students and trainees with an interest in this field. It opens with introductory chapters on the history of transplantation and the basic science of immunobiology, and then examines through an organ-based structure the practice of transplantation in each major system, from skin to intestine. There is a 13-year gap between the first and second edition, and this is highlighted in the new collection of chapters of this updated version. This is a timely publication produced in line with the rapidly advancing field of transplantation. The editor, Nadey S Hakim, is a consultant transplant and general surgeon at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, London, England, and has put together this second volume that will serve as an invaluable guide for transplant surgeons as well as trainees.

"This is a book about living solid organ donors as patients in their own right. This book is premised on the supposition that the field of living donor organ transplantation is ethical, even if some specific applications are not. Living donor organ transplantation is controversial at its core because it exposes one patient (the living donor) to clinical risks for the clinical benefit of another (the candidate recipient). It is different than obstetrics which also involves 2 patients-a pregnant woman and her fetus-- because transplantation involves two physically individuated patients who, in most cases, individually consent to the medical interventions. And in many cases, the donor-recipient interdependence is optional because deceased donor organs may be available. So before one can begin, one must ask, even if only rhetorically: Is living donation ethical? The question is not new: one of the first to ask about the ethics of living donor transplantation was Joseph Murray, the surgeon credited with performing the first successful living donor kidney transplant which paved the way for the broad adoption of kidney and other solid organ transplantation around the world"--