The Motive of Organ Transplantation

The categories of health and desease do not only have a biological but also a cultural dimension. The understanding and the social handling of deseases is determined by the collective stock of images that is virulent within a culture. This project is aiming to analyze the traditions of the motive of organ transplantation at the end of the 19th and in the first decades of the 20th century. This mainly concerns the genres of fairytales, horror stories, light fiction and science fiction and also some early films that are dealing with transplantations of human and animal organs. The study wants to discuss and make transparent the different (sometimes hidden) lines of traditions of this motive, and it also will analyze their specific dynamics and intertextual connections: When are new motives introduced? How are existing motives adapted to changing social conditions and technological possibilities? How functions the interaction between the stock of motives / images, everyday knowledge, light fiction and the fields of technological and medical progress?

Organ transplants have more or less become a commonplace occurrence in spite of all the difficulties still connected with operations of this kind. While just a few decades ago organ transplants used to get extensive media coverage, today at best exceptional operations are reported, e.g. the transplantation of a tongue or, a foreseeable development, of a head (or body). An analysis of the great number of early literary works concerned with the subject makes clear that the biotechnological progress is not the only relevant aspect of the story. These works evidence in particular the extent to which not only our concept of the body but, most of all, questions relating to what is one`s own and what is foreign, have altered over the past one-hundred years. Practically all of the early texts, with only a few exceptions, reflect sympathetic concepts of illness and the body, irrespective of the unmistakable references to medical and physiological experiments. A motif where this becomes particularly obvious is that of the donor communicating with the recipient through the organ. The hand of a murderer turns you into a murderer, that of a thief, into a thief. Even though relics of concepts like these are still present in the language of modern transplantation medicine, our comprehension of the body`s immune response has led to a redefinition of the relationship between the recipient`s body and the foreign organ. Relics of a sympathetic concept of illness may at best have survived in patients` fantasies, for instance in the belief that the donor "survives in the organ" and communicates with the recipient. The underlying "folk" theory is based on the assumption of some kind of "cellular" or "organic" consciousness. But here as well traditional concepts of illness have been replaced by biological explanations. The introduction of effective immune suppressants has turned the medical question of what is one`s own and what is foreign, into a purely biological issue. We therefore no longer need to ask for identity and the relationship between the "recipient" and the "donor" but to observe a variety of different factors, such as an increase in temperature or specific parameters determined by laboratory technicians, which might indicate a rejection of the organ.