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Marie-Andrée Jacob, Hagai Boas, The Political Economy of Organ Transplantation: Where Do Organs Come From? Routledge, Medical Law Review, Volume 33, Issue 2, Spring 2025, fwaf017, https://doi.org/10.1093/medlaw/fwaf017
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Extract
This is the book of a uniquely positioned author, who is at once a sociologist of medicine, a public educator, and a transplant recipient. His previous monograph in Hebrew, The Plural Me,1 could not have been better titled, as it alluded to his multifarious answer to the question of ‘where do organs come from.’ Boas is an active, analytical, and sophisticated witness to the history of major intellectual and technological interventions in the field in Israel and Europe. Due to the arbitrariness of life, he is also physically embedded in and absorbed by the field. The Plural Me also evoked the author’s own body as a vulnerable composite.
The Political Economy of Organ Transplantation: where do organs come from? is plural too: it offers a very satisfying engagement with the theories and frameworks that many legal scholars have wrestled with to understand the phenomenon of organ transplantation from sociological, anthropological, and ethical perspectives, and it aims to offer an alternative tack on the problem. In addition, these theoretical discussions are intercepted by detailed vignettes from the author’s own biography, letting us zoom in on a segment of Israeli society from the 1970s to this day. Boas’ generosity of spirit ought to be lauded for this. He is explicit about his dual identity as a patient and researcher. This duality, emerging at various junctures throughout, makes the book stand in sharp contrast to the well-known 1992 shock essay ‘Leaving the Field’,2 in which the two American sociologists Renée Fox and Judith Swazey explained why they became dispirited by what they saw happening in organ transplants and therefore decided together to leave this area of inquiry behind. Unlike Fox and Swazey, Boas3 knows he is captive to his survival project and simply cannot leave the field, dejecting as it may be.
