Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T14:28:15.596Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The God Squad and the Origins of Transplantation Ethics and Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Albert R. Jonsen
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

This is the God Squad. It is faceless, impersonal, unmoved by tragedy, almost terrorist in aspect. The photo appeared in LIFE magazine on November 9, 1962, and it depicted the Admissions and Policy Committee of the Seattle Artificial Kidney Center. The Committee had been established in 1962 to select those few persons who would be admitted to the new and tiny dialysis unit that was created by Dr. Belding Scribner, inventor of the arteriovenous shunt. It consisted of seven anonymous members – a minister, a lawyer, a businessman, a homemaker, a labor leader, and two physicians. Each month they received a pile of charts about persons with end-stage renal disease. A prior medical evaluation had rated them all medically suitable for dialysis. The Committee’s task was to select one or two out of a dozen or so to take the available spots. The others were left to die. After several years of this agonizing work, the amendments to the Social Security Act provided financial support for renal dialysis and transplant, allowing the Admission Committee some peace of mind.

Type
Symposium
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , Summer 2007 , pp. 238 - 240
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alexander, S., “They Decide Who Lives, Who Dies,” LIFE 53 (1962): 102–125.Google Scholar
Fox, R. and Swazey, J., The Courage to Fail (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).Google Scholar
Murray, J. A., “Organ Transplant: Practical Possibilities,” in Wolstenholme, G. and O'Connor, M., Law and Ethics of Transplantation (London: J & A Churchill, 1962): at 62.Google Scholar
Ad Hoc Committee at Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death, “The Harvard Criteria for Brain Death,” JAMA 205 (1968): 337–340.Google Scholar
Fox, R. and Swazey, J., Spare Parts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): at 199, 204.Google Scholar
Jonsen, A. R., “Scientific Medicine and Therapeutic Choice,” New England Journal of Medicine 292 (1975): 126–127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Calland, C., “Iatrogenic Problems in End-stage Renal Failure,” New England Journal of Medicine 287 (1972): 334–336.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kountz, S., “Moral Problems in Renal Transplantation,” [Medical Grand Rounds] University of California, San Francisco, April 10, 1974 (on file with the author).Google Scholar