From Publishers Weekly
Powerful, poignant, deft, this memoir in itself serves as a masterful argument for organ transplantation as Starzl, a retired pioneer in the field, re-creates the intricate history, the stunning breakthroughs and the tragic failures of the controversial surgery. Born in Iowa in 1926 to a nurse mother and a journalist-science fiction novelist father, Starzl as a young doctor showed himself to be tenacious in perfecting kidney and liver transplants, while overcoming medical infighting and resistant medical and government bureaucracies. Moving from the University of Colorado to the University of Pittsburgh--he established renal transplantation centers at both--he takes us through the advances, from the technique requiring related kidney donors to cadaveric kidney and liver implants to the development of drugs to aid in managing rejection and infection, to programs for finding donors and transporting their organs. Starzl pays tribute to colleagues who either paved the way or helped set the course, while firmly judging those he views as impeders. If he does not lay to rest the philosophical and financial issues surrounding organ transplantation, he succeeds in making us reconsider reservations, reminding us that "All triumphs in medicine are the forgotten sorrows of past days." Photos not seen by PW .
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Library Journal
Distinguished surgeon Starzl here spends relatively little time on his patients or even in the operating theater. Instead, he focuses on research funding, the politics of hospitals and medical schools, and the great number of people and scientific advances necessary for achieving successful organ transplants. He also discusses the ethics (and dilemmas) of defining brain death, of human experimentation and randomized clinical trials, and of obtaining donor organs. Though he uses his autobiography to settle a few old scores, Starzl is a good writer, skilled at explaining medical complexities in lay language without oversimplifying. He also gives credit to his nonphysician technicians and other medical colleagues. With the current debates on healthcare costs, "rationing," and perceived scientific irregularities likely to continue, this topical book is recommended for collections with strong medical or scientific/technological interests.
- Mary Chitty, Biotrends Research, Natick, Mass.Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Kirkus Reviews
An innovative transplant surgeon looks back on a long and brilliant career. Starzl's ``puzzle people'' are not only the patients whose acquisitions of new organs have profoundly altered both their bodies and their minds, but also the physicians whose lives have been changed by participating in the process. Here, the author, who no longer performs surgery but still directs the Transplantation Institute at the Univ. of Pittsburgh, probes- -albeit gingerly--at the puzzle of his own life. He draws a vivid portrait of his father, but other family members remain shadows, and he never lets us very far inside his own psyche. In rapid succession, his wife leaves him, his father and sister die, and his son suffers an emotional breakdown; these events must have been devastating, yet, on the page, Starzl's expression of pain is carefully controlled. And so is his recounting of other significant events--career shifts, professional frustrations and triumphs, a new marriage to an abused black woman, and his own heart surgeries. Throughout, the author seems most intent on setting the record straight, generously crediting those whose work helped shape his own, praising those who carry it on, and excusing those who hampered it. Individual patients are mentioned from time to time, and although Starzl clearly cares about them, he avoids sentimentality in telling their tales. Clearly having thought long and hard about the doctor-patient relationship and the place of expensive technology in our financially troubled health-care system, he voices his concerns about patients' rights and the ethical dilemmas posed by obligatory randomized drug- testing. Not an intimate self-portrait but a well-crafted glimpse into a world of science where politics and personalities often clash. (Twenty b&w photos, ten line drawings--not seen.) --
Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Review
"Starzl tells a fascinating story, not only in giving his distinctly personal view of the evolution of organ transplantation, but also about himself. His book is recommended for anyone with curiosity about transplantation, or with broad interests in current medical events and the remarkable successes in clinical and biological sciences during the latter half of the 20th century."
--New England Journal of Medicine
Book Description
Given the tensions and demands of medicine, highly successful physicians and surgeons rarely achieve equal success as prose writers. It is truly extraordinary that a major, international pioneer in the controversial field of transplant surgery should have written a spellbinding, and heart-wrenching, autobiography.
Thomas Starzl grew up in LeMars, Iowa, the son of a newspaper publisher and a nurse. His father also wrote science fiction and was acquainted with the writer Ray Bradbury. Starzl left the family business to enter Northwestern University Medical School where he earned both and M.D. and a PhD. While he was a student, and later during his surgical internship at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, he began the series of animal experiments that led eventually to the world’s first transplantation of the human liver in 1963.
Throughout his career, first at the University of Colorado and then at the University of Pittsburgh, he has aroused both worldwide admiration and controversy. His technical innovations and medical genius have revolutionized the field, but Starzl has not hesitated to address the moral and ethical issues raised by transplantation. In this book he clearly states his position on many hotly debated issues including brain death, randomized trials for experimental drugs, the costs of transplant operations, and the system for selecting organ recipients from among scores of desperately ill patients.
There are many heroes in the story of transplantation, and many “puzzle people,” the patients who, as one journalist suggested, might one day be made entirely of various transplanted parts. They are old and young, obscure and world famous. Some have been taken into the hearts of America, like Stormie Jones, the brave and beautiful child from Texas. Every patient who receives someone else’s organ - and Starzl remembers each one - is a puzzle. “It was not just the acquisition of a new part,” he writes. “The rest of the body had to change in many ways before the gift could be accepted. It was necessary for the mind to see the world in a different way.” The surgeons and physicians who pioneered transplantation were also changed: they too became puzzle people. “Some were corroded or destroyed by the experience, some were sublimated, and none remained the same.”
