Content area
Full text
Keith Wailoo, Julie Livingston, Peter Guarnaccia (eds), A death retold: Jesica Santillan, the bungled transplant, and paradoxes of medical citizenship, Studies in Social Medicine, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2006, pp. viii, 378, $55.00 (hardback 0-8078-3059-3), $21.50 (paperback 0-8078-5773-4).
Medical procedures do not take place in a vacuum. They depend upon, involve, and shape surrounding society, and access to health care services engages with fundamental ideas of who we are and how we belong. Nowhere is this more readily observed than in the case of organ transplants. Organ replacement therapies reach beyond the strictly medical world in very tangible ways, requiring the transfer of sometimes vital body parts from one person to another and involving the dilemma of how to distribute a scarce and lifesaving resource in a just and economic manner. Regulating and organizing the replacement of organs has proved controversial in most countries, and different societies have come to very different solutions on these issues. Thirty years ago, Renée Fox and Judith Swazey...