Raising the Dead: Organ Transplants, Ethics, and Society

There is no question to my mind that an organ or tissue transplant can be a life-giving and life-changing miracle for a recipient. I am one who should know this; after all, since 1990 I have had the benefit of two cadaveric kidney transplants. I know from experience the transforming power that a transplant can have on one's thinking and feeling as much as on one's health. Among other things, a transplant gives its recipient an appreciation for sacrificial generosity, and perhaps even some kind of vicarious atonement. An organ transplant is a resurrection of sorts, for both donor and recipient. I have come to believe that part of the donor's mind and body lives on in the reinvigorated bodies and souls of recipients. One can hardly avoid thinking of this in terms of religious analogies, though this book does not take the religious dimension any further than its title and a few references to the raising of Lazarus. It is sobering, to say the least, to think of one's transplant as a gift of life from the dead. It is sobering to think of a donor family's grief, out of which that gift of life has come. One must also remember the thousands who die every year while waiting for a transplant of some kind, and those whose country's healthcare system does not provide universal free access to transplant assessments and procedures. One thinks of thousands of medically suitable potential donors who miss the opportunity to donate their organs, whether out of ignorance or from a hardhearted selfishness. Sadly, too, there are thousands of families who override the consent of their loved one, or are ignorant of it, and who bury their treasure in the ground--a treasure that could save the lives of six or more people. But above all else there is great joy at the extraordinary grace that organ donation represents, and countless lives changed for ever by these healing miracles. Surely "no medical breakthrough is more spectacular, more hope-giving, or more fraught with ethical questions than organ transplantation." Raising the Dead ranks with The Nicholas Effect among the greatest literature written on the subject of organ transplantation in recent years. Written by a renowned medical ethicist with several philosophical volumes and three novels to his credit, this book takes a heart-rending and dramatic case-study approach, in an effort to "remind us not to forget the personal and emotional dimension underlying the often arid discussions of transplant ethics" (p.24). Author Ronald Munson is a brilliant storyteller who has a way of simplifying complex issues and making them understandable to the lay reader. The ethical discussions and policy proposals one finds when reading this book make it required reading for anyone involved in the transplant process, whether recipients, teams of physicians and surgeons, or health policymakers. Where the book gets somewhat more controversial is in its treatment of anencephalic infants, as well as its advocacy of organ sa