AFRO-NETS> Global traffic in human organs

[Christian Labadie <citation.thread@free.fr>]

Global traffic in human organs
------------------------------

Does a poor child really need two kidneys?

If yes, is it possible to ensure that all poor children keep both 
kidneys the Nature granted them?

To put an end to criminal medical practices such as that reported in 
the review mentioned below (based on 127 cited references), should an 
international peace and reconciliation court start to review all the 
barbarian acts that medical doctors have performed in the XXth cen-
tury, from the numerous collaborations with nazis to the recent ster-
ilisations of endogenous Peruvians? Should an independent observer(s) 
be always present during all medical acts such as a surgery or phar-
maceutical tests in order to maintain a constant stream of independ-
ent information/observation about what happens behind closed medi-
cal/pharmaceutical doors? Is the medical secret a threat for pa-
tients, an opportunity for criminal doctors, a weakness for over-
worked medical talents, and a strength for global capitalists? Have 
you ever met a medical student explaining to his/her patient that 
he/she is on duty since over 24 hours, is taking stimulants to keep 
up with the pressure and is concerned about the risk that he/she 
represents to his/her patients (I have met medical students who told 
me just that in private, and acknowledged they had made mistakes in 
the operating room as a consequence, but their patients never got to 
hear those kind of confidences)? Should patients be coined "actients" 
in order to empower them and to protect them from passiveness (which 
is no longer limited to that of patiently waiting outside a medical 
cabinet)? 

When so many exceptions have been introduced into the sermon of Hypo-
crates, could one say that medical knowledge should no longer be the 
privilege of medical practitioners? Is the root of the medical crimi-
nality the numerus clausus at medical schools? Should that numerus 
clausus be only introduced after the doctoral grade in order to dras-
tically increase the proportion of the population with an in depth 
doctoral medical knowledge? Is the scarcity of doctoral medical 
knowledge the root of many criminal situations? Should there be a 
separation of doctoral medical powers to ensure that a medical doctor 
never face the need to kill? Should the act of killing or decid-
ing/recommending/informing about a patient death be kept outside of 
the medical profession? Does one need to study a decade in order to 
learn how to give a lethal injection? Is it time to raise awareness 
and to face the need to rethink medical studies and professions? 

If all medical doctors wear the same white coat, how is it possible 
to distinguish between them? Is it time to reconsider the medical 
status quo?

Christian Labadie
mailto:citation.thread@free.fr

--
THE GLOBAL TRAFFIC IN HUMAN ORGANS 
Scheper-Hughes N (University California Berkeley, USA) 
Current Anthropology, 41 (2): 191-224 April 2000

Abstract: Inspired by Sweetness and Power, in which Sidney Mintz 
traces the colonial and mercantilist routes of enslaving tastes and 
artificial needs, this paper maps a late-20th-century global trade in 
bodies, body parts, desires, and invented scarcities. Organ trans-
plant takes place today in a transnational space with surgeons, pa-
tients, organ donors, recipients, brokers, and intermediaries-some 
with criminal connections-following new paths of capital and technol-
ogy in the global economy. The stakes are high, for the technologies 
and practices of transplant surgery have demonstrated their power to 
reconceptualize the human body and the relations of body parts to the 
whole and to the person and of people and bodies to each other. The 
phenomenal spread of these technologies and the artificial needs, 
scarcities, and new commodities (i.e., fresh organs) that they in-
spire -especially within the context of a triumphant neoliberalism-
raise many issues central to anthropology's concern with global domi-
nations and local resistances, including the reordering of relations 
between individual bodies and the state, between gifts and commodi-
ties, between fact and rumor, and between medicine and magic in post-
modernity.

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