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Haunting Transplants: The Frankenstein Factor

Haunting Transplants: The Frankenstein Factor <jats:p> Soon after Christiaan Barnard performed the world's first successful human-to-human heart transplant in 1967, his patient Louis Washkansky declared himself to be the new ‘Frankenstein’ (Sun: 7 December 1967). That joke, though it confused Mary Shelley's doctor with the creature he had made, resonated with long-held misgivings about medical scientists' work at the boundary between life and death. Washkansky was not alone in relating organ transplantation to Shelley's novel. He gave this endeavour a fictional reference point, in the form of a laboratory scientist who created life from the bits and pieces he had cut from corpses. But others made sense of organ grafting by calling upon confronting aspects of medicine's actual past, which haunted such surgery in this early period. This article, grounded in archival material, parliamentary debates and contemporary newspaper and journal reports, contributes to the historical understanding of organ transplantation as it was performed in the United Kingdom during the 1960s. </jats:p> http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Somatechnics Edinburgh University Press

Haunting Transplants: The Frankenstein Factor

Somatechnics , Volume 2 (2): 216 – Sep 1, 2012

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References (28)

Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
Copyright
© Edinburgh University Press
Subject
Special Issue Introduction; Film, Media and Cultural Studies
ISSN
2044-0138
eISSN
2044-0146
DOI
10.3366/soma.2012.0058
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

<jats:p> Soon after Christiaan Barnard performed the world's first successful human-to-human heart transplant in 1967, his patient Louis Washkansky declared himself to be the new ‘Frankenstein’ (Sun: 7 December 1967). That joke, though it confused Mary Shelley's doctor with the creature he had made, resonated with long-held misgivings about medical scientists' work at the boundary between life and death. Washkansky was not alone in relating organ transplantation to Shelley's novel. He gave this endeavour a fictional reference point, in the form of a laboratory scientist who created life from the bits and pieces he had cut from corpses. But others made sense of organ grafting by calling upon confronting aspects of medicine's actual past, which haunted such surgery in this early period. This article, grounded in archival material, parliamentary debates and contemporary newspaper and journal reports, contributes to the historical understanding of organ transplantation as it was performed in the United Kingdom during the 1960s. </jats:p>

Journal

SomatechnicsEdinburgh University Press

Published: Sep 1, 2012

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