Bioethics in the Making
“Ideal Patients” and the Beginnings of Face Transplant Surgery in Mexico
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12205276 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Samuel Taylor‐alexander (0000-0002-0083-2355, University of Auckland, corresponding author), Samuel Taylor-Alexander |
| Year | 2013 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 27-50 |
| Publication date | 2013-05-22 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Science as Culture (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0950-5431 • E-ISSN: 1470-1189 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/09505431.2013.789843 |
| OpenAlex | W2000045021 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
| References cited | 26 |
Medical teams around the world are increasingly gaining ethical clearance to utilise face transplant surgery as a reconstructive surgical procedure. Analysis of the beginnings of the operation in Mexico vis-à-vis the early uptake of the procedure in France reveals that this controversial experimental medical field has become loaded with national significance. The primary issue of dispute has been the dependence on life-threatening immunosuppressant therapy in a procedure that treats otherwise biologically healthy people. Attempts to resolve related debate has resulted in the emergence of what my interlocutors refer to as an “ideal patient”, a person whose particular state of health and suffering render them operable within the current biomedical constraints. Drawing together the idiom of coproduction with the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries shows how this imagined patient category was refracted and stabilised as it entered into the Mexican context whilst producing patients and surgical experts as particular types of bioethical subjects. The flexibility and normative value of the “ideal patient” mobilises and is mobilised by surgeons, who themselves emerge as national bioethical subjects responsible for saving the face of nations in the midst of broader changes surrounding how State's should respond to medical advancement
Bioethics · Context (archaeology · Face (sociological concept · Ideal (ethics · Normative · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Value (mathematics · Bioethics and Human Rights Issues · Biomedical Ethics and Regulation · History · Law · Medicine · Organ and Tissue Transplantation Research
Liminality, possibility, and imperative
On face transplantation
Consumer logics and the relational performance of selling high-risk goods
Bioprophecy and the politics of the present
From Face/Off to the face race
A Procedure Without a Problem’, or the face transplant that didn’t happen. The Royal Free, the Royal College of Surgeons and the challenge of surgical firsts
Ethics in Numbers
Normal/Modern
A Note on Science and Democracy?
Life Exposed
Designs on Nature
Modern Social Imaginaries
States of Knowledge
When Experiments Travel
“Bioethics in Action” and Human Population Genetics Research
The Biotechnical Embrace
The Human Genome Diversity Project
On face transplantation
Containing the Atom
Writing at the Margin
Ethical variability
The Coproduction of Moral Discourse in U.S. Community Psychiatry
Scientific Imaginaries and Ethical Plateaus in Contemporary U.S. Toxicology
The science of ethics
The Scientific Life
Knowledge Rites and the Right Not to Know
Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico
Medicare, Ethics, and Reflexive Longevity
| Unique citing works | 8 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,62 |
| Citation span | 2013 - 2023 (11) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 8 |