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Reaching Consensus About Death: Heart Transplants and Cultural Identity in Japan

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Social Science Perspectives on Medical Ethics

Part of the book series: Culture, Illness, and Healing ((CIHE,volume 16))

Abstract

The performing of certain kinds of organ transplants calls into question a universal event thought to be the most “natural” of all: death. By tinkering with dying we start to make what is usually taken as an unassailable division between culture and nature rather fuzzy at the seams. A comparative analysis of how different societies respond to this situation can encourage a reflective re-examination of what we in North America and Europe have come to accept as inevitable in contemporary medical care, namely, a gradual refinement in the technology and drugs associated with organ transplantation, and hence an increase in the number and further routinization of such operations.

[History] no longer speaks of the changeless but, rather, of the laws of change which spare nothing. Everywhere history is seen as progress, sometimes sociopolitical progress, and continually technological progress….

John Berger

And our faces, my heart, brief as photos (1984)

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Authors
  1. Margaret Lock
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  2. Christina Honde
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Humanities and Social Studies in Medicine, McGill University, 3655 Drummond Street, Room 416, Montreal, PQ, H3G 1Y6, Canada

    George Weisz

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© 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers

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Lock, M., Honde, C. (1990). Reaching Consensus About Death: Heart Transplants and Cultural Identity in Japan. In: Weisz, G. (eds) Social Science Perspectives on Medical Ethics. Culture, Illness, and Healing, vol 16. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1930-3_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1930-3_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-94-010-7361-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-009-1930-3

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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