Transplantation Ethics

Although the history of organ transplant has its roots in ancient Christian mythology, it is only in the past fifty years that body parts from a dead person have successfully been procured and transplanted into a living person. This book offers a critical work on transplantation policies.

Debates about the ethics of organ transplantation address three primary decisions: when human beings are dead; when it is ethical to procure organs; and how to allocate organs once they are procured. Robert M. Veatch''s Transplantation Ethics, the seminal book in the field since its publication in 2000, is a systematic overview of the subject aimed at transplant professionals, physicians, nurses, social workers, scholars and students in bioethics, and public policy advocates. But much has changed in the field in the past fourteen years: new allocation schemes are underway; living donors are more widely used, with living children now under consideration; stem cell use is under increased consideration; and on and on. This new edition, coauthored by the University of Chicago''s Lanie F. Ross, will be a thorough revision that prunes older and less relevant chapters and adds new sections and chapters such as challenges to the "dead donor rule," organ swaps and chains, splitting lungs and livers, allocating organs to the severely disabled, first person consent, using prisoners as donors, hand and face and uterine transplants, and much more.