Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You
Last week, the world learned the identity of the person who received the first successful face transplant performed in the U.S. – Connie Culp of Ohio underwent a 22-hour operation last December during which doctors replaced about 80% of her face with tissue from a donor. Amazing, right?
Connie Culp's groundbreaking procedure sounds like science fiction, but other transplant surgeries have proven so sucessful that they don't get much comment from the public. Curious about how we got this far? Check out Transplant: From Myth to Reality. In a straightforward but engaging style, author Nicholas L. Tilney traces the history of organ transplantation from ancient times to the present, with an especial focus on the development of kidney and heart transplants during the middle of the 20th century. If you're still curious, you can find more current information and facts about organ transplants at the National Library of Medicine's health information website MedlinePlus.
In order for people to receive organ transplants, someone has to donate their organs. Some organs are donated from living donors – often family members or other loved ones. But there are organs, like the heart and corneas, that no one wants to do without. These are gifts from beyond the grave, given by with the consent of the donor or their family (in Oregon and Washington, you can register as an organ donor at Donate Life Northwest). In her book Body Brokers, Annie Cheney explores a related, but much shadier world, in which "body brokers" buy and sell human remains for medical research and training, commercial use by medical gadget companies, and for use in military bomb tests. Horrific! But fascinating.
Lesley A. Sharp discusses some of the same questions in her book Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies, but she takes more of a sociological angle. What is the value we place on a donor's body, and how do we memorialize the people who donate their organs? What does it mean for human body parts to function as commodities, with monetary value placed on their transfer and use? Can we manage the ethcial challenges of transplants between species? These are lofty questions, and Sharp's analysis is probing and intelligent, but eminently accessible.
On a lighter, more ironic note, transplants, transplant surgery, and transplant patients have always been fodder for fiction, of the human drama sort and the more speculative, science fiction sort. And sometimes these stories are, as they say, ripped from the headlines. When convicted killer Gary Gilmore was executed by the state of Utah in 1977, he asked that his organs be donated for transplant. The British punk rock group the Adverts wrote a hit song, "Gary Gilmore's Eyes," in which the singer wakes up more than a little startled to realize that he's been given the gift of a murderer's sight. Here are the Adverts performing the song on Top of the Pops in August, 1977:
(You can also get "Gary Gilmore's Eyes" on CD at the library. It's on Crossing the Red Sea With The Adverts, and on disc two of No Thanks!: The 70s Punk Rebellion.)
Posted by Emily-Jane
Ironically, I don't pay much attention to the news-news, if you know what I mean. So when a colleague came to me a few days ago with a look of horror on her face and said, "I'm going to Mexico in a couple weeks!", I didn't get it. And when I congratulated her on it (because that seemed like the right thing to do) and she looked at me like I had lost my mind, it dawned on me that perhaps I was missing something...and that something was swine flu. Which is, again, ironic, because plague-like pandemics are one of my very favorite topics to read about! There are so many riveting and downright scary stories out there, both true and made up, about blights taking out major sections of the population - or the entire population in the case of The History of the Dead - that it's almost too hard to choose...
The first book I want to talk about it is a fascinating recommendation I got from Emily-Jane. It's Sandra Hempel's The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump and details the true story of John Snow, a doctor in Victorian England, who through determination and scientific investigation (an unknown practice at the time) discovered that cholera was being spread through contaminated drinking water and not just "bad air". This is one of those non-fiction books that read more like a thriller!
Back in college I studied history and one fine day William H. McNeill came to my school and read from his book Plagues and Peoples. In my previous years of studying history I had never heard anyone mention that blankets full of smallpox were just as important to the shaping of mankind's history as the Battle of the Bulge. McNeill and his book intrigued me, and though there have been many books written on similar topics since Plagues and Peoples, in my opinion this is one of the best.
One of my all-time favorite authors is Connie Willis, and one of my favorite books by her is called The Doomsday Book. This award-winning story mixes time-travel, an influenza epidemic in 2054, and the Black Death of 1348. I remember being on the edge of my seat with worry over the characters I had grown so fond of, and Willis does a brilliant job creating a believable future-world while describing with historic accuracy the plague of the Middle Ages.
For more information on swine flu, both the state of Oregon and Multnomah County have set up web pages with up-to-date information. And we here at the library are also keeping folks informed!
Posted by Jennifer
