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The Patient Who Is Not: Are Living Organ Donors a Blind Spot in the Medical Gaze?

Megan Crowley-Matoka, PhD
Assistant Professor of Medical Humanities & Bioethics
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

The classic ethical underpinnings of living organ donation in the U.S. require that living donors be healthy people who have freely chosen to give up part of their own bodies for the benefit of another person. Intended to be protective, this conception of living donors also sets them apart from the traditional role of the patient – a role to which the transplant recipient can always more compellingly lay claim. This talk draws on ethnographic research with living kidney and liver donors to explore the consequential ways in which living donors may be perceived – and, critically, may perceive themselves – as “non-patients.” Beyond implications for the ethics and practice of transplantation itself, I suggest attending seriously to this dimension of the living donation experience also opens up a set of larger questions about the shifting status of “patient-hood” in American biomedicine.