Living renal donation

Abstract

‘Saving life’ has become a dominant rhetoric of twentieth-century science-based medicine. One key process through which this is most visible is that associated with the rapidly increasing technologies of transplantation. From the very beginning of transplantation techniques, the possible advantages of ‘live donation’ have been espoused. Such donation has been considered to have a number of advantages. These have related to function — being a better match, for example, and also in many cases to availability. In a further development of this approach, familial living donation in relation to kidney failure has sometimes been seen as ‘the answer’ to organ shortages.

This paper describes the use of ethnography in a busy teaching hospital amongst renal clinicians. The methodology has enabled the author to capture the social and cultural context of living donation. The paper highlights how individual medical-value orientations juxtapose rational, technological ways of knowing with interpretative, intuitive and experiential knowledge.