Craddock’s explanation of how this knowledge made its way from a coastal village in Calabria to the great university cities of Europe encompasses ancient agriculture, the Galenic doctrine of the four bodily humours, and an illuminating digression about Renaissance gardens. The chapters on blood transfusion and tooth transplantation achieve an equally happy synthesis of intellectual and medical history, drawing on Cartesian philosophy, Vitalism and the remarkable inventions of Jacques de Vaucanson, who constructed automata that included a realistic defecating duck ... one of the surprises of this 'surprising history' is what has been left out. Craddock does not explore the furious moral debate that engulfed transplantation in the 1960s, when concerns over the ethics of organ donation led to nothing less than the redefinition of what it means to be dead or alive. Nor is there any mention of xenotransplantation, the history of (mostly disastrous) attempts to transplant animal organs into humans ... That these omissions are worthy of mention is a tribute to the overall excellence of the book. Much has been written about this subject, but with Spare Parts Paul Craddock has achieved something unique: a serious, entertaining and thoroughly researched work that usefully sets the history of transplantation in the context of the evolution of ideas about the human body.
This parade of death and disease, human ingenuity mingled with so much callousness, and a succession of eminent medics motivated more by the thrill of acclaim than Hippocratic duty or the milk of human kindness, can make for queasy reading, but the author, a research associate at UCL and the Science Museum, strives to keep it compelling...Occasional gleams of spontaneous humanity certainly come as a relief.
The charm and value of Spare Parts comes from situating these landmarks in a wider history of ideas ... I only wish Craddock had discussed the intertwined history of prosthesis, and how non-human adjuncts compete with flesh and blood ... takes pains to keep the donors in view. The contributions of these silent figures have traditionally been considered worthless because they were existential rather than intellectual. Which left me wondering whether this really is the ‘surprising history’ Craddock’s subtitle claims.
The cultural thread of transplant is measured in quacks, innovators and medical somersaults, told through the voice of a historian handling dense levels of research ... The themes of erasure and experimentation thread through the book, and the discomfort of the arrangement probes an awareness in the reader ... We arrive again at the mechanical language of the book’s opening scene that privileges the scientific over the tender, the medical detail over the man experiencing the moment ... I wonder if the stiffness of the material is merely a consequence of available information. However, the biography reveals something more heart-based ... The narrative stays alert to the intricacies of churning blood and the meat-like consistency of organs, but it fails to slow down and reimagine the emotional context for donor and recipient ... The summary thoughts of the writer in the final chapter could have served as a structural engine had they arrived much earlier. The book raises questions about how we relate to one another, what stories we choose to privilege and who gets to tell them. It doesn’t unpack the emotional ways we deal with and survive the very thing Craddock has charted: transplant ... Without this, the prose remains medicalised, and the marvellous breadth of the book is suffocated by its tone. The opportunity of being alive and present and accountable to one another, the miracle and monstrosity created, means more space and a slower, thoughtful consideration is needed ... It is the tenderness with which Craddock connects to this image that would have benefited the text itself.
Craddock provides entertaining details of the lives involved along the way ... This fascinating and lively medical history will appeal to lay readers and anyone interested in the history of medicine.
... accessible and wide-ranging ... Amid the toe-curling descriptions of vivisected dogs and doomed trial runs at human-to-human tooth transplants are hopeful and inspiring accounts of how farmers and embroiderers shared their knowledge with medical practitioners and the roles played by sausage skins and spinach leaves in the development of skills and materials required for organ transplants. Thoroughly researched and appealingly digressive, this fascinating medical and cultural history sheds light on what it means to be human.
