Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death
Tales about organ transplants appear in mythology and folk stories, and surface in documents from medieval times, but only during the past twenty years has medical knowledge and technology been sufficiently advanced for surgeons to perform thousands of transplants each year.\ In the majority of cases individuals diagnosed as "brain dead" are the source of the organs without which transplants could not take place.\ In this compelling and provocative examination, Margaret Lock traces the...
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Margaret Lock's Twice Dead is a deeply moving book that raises critically important questions about life and death in the modern world. It is a masterpiece of comparative anthropology and will surely appeal to a wide audience-to people interested in ethics, anthropology, science studies, and studies of the body.—Bruno Latour, author of Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science StudiesThis is an excellent and exceptional book in three distinct ways: first, in making us rethink the recent changes in our criteria for death; second, in the careful comparative anthropology of Japanese and North American attitudes to organ transplants; and third, in making us see clearly the connection between organ transplants and changing criteria for death. What we have often taken innocently as the progress of medicine is an intricate and complex story about the meaning of life and our body parts.—Ian Hacking, author of The Social Construction of What?Twice Dead is a marvel of perfect tensions. While eschewing simple cultural dichotomies, it deftly balances the immediacy of interviews with deep historical reflection; its theoretical insights are razor-sharp, yet its spirit is unfailingly compassionate. Wise and eminently readable, Lock's superb book portrays how impersonal, modern technology compels us to grapple with the most intimate, age-old questions-the bonds between bodies and persons, the borders between the living and the dead.—Shigehisa Kuriyama, author of The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese MedicineIn writing Twice Dead, Lock has performed a magisterial act of scholarship. The text is all-inclusive, fair-minded, and based on the most scrupulous use of the anthropological armamentarium. A must-read for doctors!—Richard Selzer, M.D., The Exact Location of the Soul: New and Selected Essays
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsPreamble: Accidental Death11Boundary Transgressions and Moral Uncertainty322Technology in Extremis573Locating the Moment of Death784Making the New Death Uniform1035Japan and the Brain-Death "Problem"1306Technology as Other: Japanese Modernity and Technology1497Prevailing against Inertia: An Interim Resolution to the Brain-Death Debate1678Social Death and Situated Departures1919Imagined Continuities: On Becoming an Ancestor20910When Bodies Outlive Persons23511When Persons Linger in Bodies26312The Body Transcendent29113The Social Life of Human Organs31514Revisiting Vivisection in a World Short of Organs347Reflections365Bibliography379Index417
