Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death (Public Anthropology)

Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece of social research
Review: Margaret Lock discusses how organ transplant interests fostered the notion of brain death in North America and Japan. Until recently, Japan did not accept brain death as a sufficient criterion of death, even when the Japanese had all the technology and medical skills to carry out organ transplantation. By contrasting the muted discussion about brain death in North America with the heated, well informed public debates in Japan, Lock makes readers uncomfortable. Are people declared brain dead in America really dead, or do neurologists simply assume that they are dead to allow transplantation to take place? When does death occur anyway; is it a process or an event? Should physicians determine death with technological guidelines, or should death be defined by the people who are the most implicated, like relatives? Lock does not provide easy answers to those questions but her exhaustive research indicates how a different consensus about brain death emerged in the East and the West.
This book is a masterpiece of social research that does not succumb to cheap moralizing. Lucidly written, it is solidly grounded in anthropology but widely accessible. I strongly recommend it to anyone with an interest in medicine or anthropology.