Organ transplantation is a medical innovation that has offered the
potential to enhance and save lives since the first successful procedure
in the 1950s. Subsequent developments in scientific knowledge and
advances in surgical techniques have allowed for more efficient and
refined procurement, minimal surgical complications, and increased
success rate. However, procedures such as organ transplantation raise
questions about the nature of our relationship with our own bodies;
about our embodiment and personal and corporeal identity.
This book is comprised of academic essays, personal reflections, and
creative writing from researchers and artists involved in an ongoing
collaborative art-science project about the experience and culture of
heart transplantation. The writings and reflections included discuss
embodiment, what it means to inhabit a body and define oneself in
relation to it, including struggles with identity formation; set in both
clinical and private spaces.
The uniqueness of this volume consists in the authors' aim of connecting
the specific experience of heart transplantation to the more widely
shared experience of relating to the world and one another through the
body's physical, perceived, and imagined boundaries. Such boundaries and
the commonly held beliefs in personal autonomy that are associated with
them are a subject of ongoing philosophical and scientific debate.
What's more, the resources of art and culture, including popular
culture, literature, historical and contemporary art, are extremely
useful in revising our views of what it means for the body's boundaries
to be philosophically 'leaky.'
Following the discussion initiated by contributor Margrit Shildrick,
this book contributes to the field of inquiry of the phenomenon of
embodiment and inter-corporeality, the growing body of literature
emerging from collaborative art-science research projects, and the wider
area of disability studies. This book will be of particular interest to
those with personal, scholarly, and creative interests in the experience
of transplantation, or illness in general.
