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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 areold 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."
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Daniel Parker
reviewed The Puzzle People: Memoirs of a Transplant Surgeon on September 26, 2012
The Puzzle People: Memoirs of a Transplant Surgeon
I have spent a good part of the last 30 years covering the author of this book for my newspaper, and I have to say that this autobiography captures him very well. On the one hand, it shows his remarkable persistence, courage and intelligence in pursuing the dream of organ transplantation, especially in the days when death rates were high and much of the medical establishment stood against him.
It also reveals his big heart, especially for the children whose lives he sought to save. Many have said that Tom Starzl was never happier than when he attended the reunions of children who had received transplants. In the course of his obsessive dedication, however, he also saw his first marriage crumble, and his relationships with his own children were hurt as well.
Starzl the doctor writes well, except for those moments in his life when he wants to be vague, either to protect himself and others, and then his prose becomes more than a little opaque. The failure of his first marriage, the attacks his program suffered when a Pittsburgh newspaper wrote a Pulitzer-winning series about favoritism shown to Middle Eastern kidney patients, and other touchy episodes are mentioned briefly or not at all.
But when he wants to explain the importance of the liver to human health and the vital need for transplants for those who have no other option, he is clear, compelling and does not ever lapse into jargon. And he shows clearly why research was always as important to him as surgical mastery. In fact, he reveals, he never liked doing surgery, and was always afraid of failing his patients.
The book is also filled with many poignant moments. Two that stick in my mind are Dr. Starzl visiting his ailing father, who had suffered two strokes and was paralyzed from the neck down, and being mystified by the background noise. A nurse told him that his father, who had long run the town's newspaper, had asked that the everyday noises of the newsroom be piped into his room to give him comfort. Another was after a very long operation, when one doctor on Starzl's team had to manually pump pint after pint of blood into the patient over a 20-hour period, and collapsed sobbing at the end of the successful operation, both from pain and sheer relief.
The Puzzle People is well worth reading if you want to understand the uphill swim that organ transplantation went through in the 1960s and 1970s, and for its sharply etched portraits of some of the pioneers in the field.
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