Three decades after the first heart transplant surgery stunned the world, organs including eyes, lungs, livers, kidneys, and hearts are transplanted every day. But despite its increasingly routine nature-or perhaps because of it-transplantation offers enormous ethical challenges. A medical ethicist who has been involved in the organ transplant debate for many years, Robert M. Veatch explores a variety of questions that continue to vex the transplantation community, offering his own solutions in many cases.

Ranging from the most fundamental questions to recently emerging issues, Transplantation Ethics is the first complete and systematic account of the ethical and policy controversies surrounding organ transplants. Veatch structures his discussion around three major topics: the definition of death, the procurement of organs, and the allocation of organs. He lobbies for an allocation system-administered by nonphysicians-that considers both efficiency and equity, that takes into consideration the patient's age and previous transplant history, and that operates on a national rather than a regional level.

Rich with case studies and written in an accessible style, this comprehensive reference is intended for a broad cross section of people interested in the ethics of transplantation from either the medical or public policy perspective: patients and their relatives, transplantation professionals, other health care professionals and administrators, social workers, members of organ procurement organizations, and government officials involved in the regulation of transplants.

Although the history of organ transplant has its roots in ancient Christian mythology, it is only in the past fifty years that body parts from a dead person have successfully been procured and transplanted into a living person. After fourteen years, the three main issues that Robert Veatch first outlined in his seminal study Transplantation Ethics still remain: deciding when human beings are dead; deciding when it is ethical to procure organs; and deciding how to allocate organs, once procured.

However, much has changed. Enormous strides have been made in immunosuppression. Alternatives to the donation model are debated much more openly—living donors are used more widely and hand and face transplants have become more common, raising issues of personal identity. In this second edition of Transplantation Ethics, coauthored by Lainie F. Ross, transplant professionals and advocates will find a comprehensive update of this critical work on transplantation policies.