On Face Transplantation: Life and Ethics in Experimental Biomedicine

By: Samuel Taylor-Alexander

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Synopsis: Drawing together interview material, medical publications, and first-hand accounts, this book shows that what is being remade in the burgeoning medical field of face transplantation is not only the lives of patients, but also the very ways that state institutions, surgeons, and families make sense of rights, claims for inclusion, and life itself. This sophisticated account traces the work done by medical and bureaucratic elites to make the life threatening operation a clinical reality. Working within the context of increasing ethical scrutiny, their endeavour has resulted in the delineation of the 'ideal patient' of face transplantation: a person whose particular state of health and suffering allows the operation to be performed given current technical constraints. The operation has introduced into the lives of face transplant recipients a profoundly new sense of personhood in which they continue to negotiate questions of how to relate to their new biology and to those around them.