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Spare Parts: Organ Replacement in American Society

Online ISBN:
9780197708644
Print ISBN:
9780195076509
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Spare Parts: Organ Replacement in American Society

Published online:
31 October 2023
Published in print:
3 September 1992
Online ISBN:
9780197708644
Print ISBN:
9780195076509
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

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.

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