Transplant: From Myth to Reality

Rating:
Summary: From Two-Headed Dogs to the Bionic Man
Review: The book jacket said this book is for the general public as well as the medical profession, so I gave it a shot. And it's great!

Transplant explains what is probably very basic, such as the fact that a heart transplant is completely different from a liver transplant (I guess I had thought that once they'd figured out how to pop one organ into someone, the procedure would be pretty much the same for the other organs). Transplant also goes into more detail for those who are medically inclined. Still, there really wasn't very much that an interested and moderately intelligent reader couldn't understand.

Tilney covers many aspects of transplantation, such as the mythology of grafting parts of one being onto another, the pre-twentieth century history of transplants (rather gruesome), the trial-and-error progress through most of the twentieth century, the ethics of using organs from the brain-dead or from other species, and the cultural differences that make donating organs almost impossible in some countries (in Japan, for instance, a person isn't considered dead until their heart stops beating, so there is no such thing there as being brain-dead). An interesting sidelight was the effect of war on the progress of transplantation studies. World War II provided thousands of burn victims, so that by the end of the war, surgeons had developed the procedures for skin grafts and were quite proficient at it. But the same war caused delays in the progress of kidney transplant science when the Nazis disrupted the work of Dutch doctors.

Transplant has numerous photos to illustrate the readable and engaging text. And every so often Tilney tosses in an amusing story to liven things up. Like the story of a group of transplanted monkeys in Canada who got hooked on soap operas, which made it easy for the researchers to determine when they weren't feeling well. When the monkeys weren't interested in their soaps, something was wrong!

Transplant not only filled in some big gaps in my education, but it really made me appreciate what huge advances medicine made in the last fifty years. And how much more we have to learn.