malcolm voyce |
-
02.08.2018-29.08.2018
Organ Transplants and Buddhist Approaches to Death
Publish an article for a palliative care journal outlining the various cultural and Buddhist issues facing potential donors and their families. The article proposes to deploy Foucault’s arguments on ‘medicalization’ and ‘care of the self’as regards formuting a self help approach to life.
The approach of this article criticizes the dominant approach to organ transplants which sees the donation of organs as a ‘gift of life’ (after Marcel Mauss 1925). Another approach i wish to develop sees organ transplant as a form of sacrifice (Titmuss 1970). As a point of departure I wish to develop the argument that with the developing medical intervention and routinization into the death process that the traditional transition of the dying person as understood in Buddhism is being changed. In this new form of death patients are adopting ‘care of the self’, notions to the dying process which incorporates and modifies traditional Buddhist understandings of death.