Judith P. Swazey

The essays in this volume pay tribute to the achievements of RenÚe C. Fox in the fields of medicine and sociology. Many of the contributors are Fox's colleagues and former students from medicine, sociology, nursing, and bioethics. The title--Society and Medicine--reflects the leitmotif in Fox's work: her studies of and teaching about the nature of medicine and medical research; the training and work of their practitioners; the interrelationships between medicine and the societies and cultures of which it is a part; and, above all, the moral and spiritual dimensions of the healing arts.

The story of one of the most public failures in healthcare consolidation

Based on original primary and extensive secondary source materials, the book views bioethics as a complex phenomenon that is not only related to advances in modern biology, medicine, and biotechnology, but also to the fundamental values and beliefs and larger moral and existential questions which American society has been collectively grappling in its courts, legislatures, and media. Although they center their analysis on U.S. bioethics, the authors also trace the field's international spread, including case studies of bioethics in France and Pakistan - two of the many societies in which it has developed. While recognizing the intellectual, moral and sociological importance of American bioethics, they are critical of certain of its characteristics, and concerned about their implications-especially the problems of thinking socially, culturally, and internationally that have existed since bioethics' inception; the field's "tenuous interdisciplinarity"; and the extent to which the "culture wars" on the larger American scene have recently penetrated it.

The essays in this volume pay tribute to the achievements of RenÚe C. Fox in the fields of medicine and sociology. Many of the contributors are Fox's colleagues and former students from medicine, sociology, nursing, and bioethics. The title--Society and Medicine--reflects the leitmotif in Fox's work: her studies of and teaching about the nature of medicine and medical research; the training and work of their practitioners; the interrelationships between medicine and the societies and cultures of which it is a part; and, above all, the moral and spiritual dimensions of the healing arts.

Spare Parts centres on the developments that have occurred in the field of organ transplantation during the 1980s and early 1990s, and on the rise and fall of the Jarvik-7 artificial heart in that period. It is vividly written in a narrative ethnographic style. The interconnected stories of organ transplantation and the artificial heart are recounted in an interpretive framework that attributes their most enduring significance to the triple themes of uncertainty, gift exchange, and the allocation of scarce material and non-material resources, and to the way that they open questions of life and death, identity and solidarity.