| 1. |
- Shildrick, Margrit, et al.
(författare)
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Messy entanglements: research assemblages in heart transplantation discourses and practices
- 2018
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Ingår i: Medical Humanities. - : BMJ PUBLISHING GROUP. - 1468-215X .- 1473-4265. ; 44:1, s. 46-54
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The paper engages with a variety of data around a supposedly single biomedical event, that of heart transplantation. In conventional discourse, organ transplantation constitutes an unproblematised form of spare part surgery in which failing biological components are replaced by more efficient and enduring ones, but once that simple picture is complicated by employing a radically interdisciplinary approach, any biomedical certainty is profoundly disrupted. Our aim, as a cross-sectorial partnership, has been to explore the complexities of heart transplantation by explicitly entangling research from the arts, biosciences and humanities without privileging any one discourse. It has been no easy enterprise yet it has been highly productive of new insights. We draw on our own ongoing funded research with both heart donor families and recipients to explore our different perceptions of what constitutes data and to demonstrate how the dynamic entangling of multiple data produces a constitutive assemblage of elements in which no one can claim priority. Our claim is that the use of such research assemblages and the collaborations that we bring to our project breaks through disciplinary silos to enable a fuller comprehension of the significance and experience of heart transplantation in both theory and practice.
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| 2. |
- Shildrick, Margrit, 1949-, et al.
(författare)
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Troubling dimensions of heart transplantation
- 2009
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Ingår i: Medical Humanities. - : B M J Group. - 1468-215X .- 1473-4265. ; 35:1, s. 35-38
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Heart transplantation is now the accepted therapy for end-stage heart failure that is resistant to medical treatment. Families of deceased donors routinely are urged to view the heart as a "gift of life" that will enable the donor to live on by extending and sustaining the life of a stranger. In contrast, heart recipients are encouraged to view the organ mechanistically--as a new pump that was rendered a spare, reusable part when a generous stranger died. Psychosocial and psychoanalytic research, anecdotal evidence and first-person accounts indicate that after transplant, many recipients experience unexpected changes or distress that cannot be understood adequately using biomedical explanatory models alone. In this paper it is argued that phenomenological philosophy offers a promising way to frame an ongoing empirical study that asks recipients to reflect on what it is like to incorporate the heart of another person. Merleau-Ponty and others have posited that any change to the body inevitably transforms the self. Hence, it is argued in this paper that replacing failing hearts with functioning hearts from deceased persons must be considered much more than a complex technical procedure. Acknowledging the disturbances to embodiment and personal identity associated with transplantation may explain adverse outcomes that heretofore have been inexplicable. Ultimately, a phenomenological understanding could lead to improvements in the consent process, preoperative teaching and follow-up care.
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