Spare Parts: Organ Replacement in American Society - Hardcover

The book is an encyclopedic source ... This is an important book which warrants close study and thought by all those who share an in-depth or even cursory interest in the area of replacement therapy or organ transplantation. (Ivor Lensworth Livingston, Howard University, Social Science and Medicine (Vol. 35, No. 5))

can be profitably read by those looking for a concise source of details about recent trends in transplantation ... Readers will find many useful references and quotations, as well as interview materials gathered by the authors that are not available elsewhere ... Fox and Swazey have tried to convince readers, through a wealth of details and analysis, that organ replacement has gone too far. (Peter A. Ubel, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, The Journal of Clinical Ethics, Volume 5, Number 2, Summer 1994)

Spare Parts centres on the developments that have occurred in the field of organ transplantation during the 1980s and early 1990s, and on the rise and fall of the Jarvik-7 artificial heart in that period. It is vividly written in a narrative ethnographic style. The interconnected stories of organ transplantation and the artificial heart are recounted in an interpretive framework that attributes their most enduring significance to the triple themes of uncertainty, gift exchange, and the allocation of scarce material and non-material resources, and to the way that they open questions of life and death, identity and solidarity.