The narrative stays alert to the intricacies of churning blood and the meat-like consistency of organs, but it fails to slow down and reimagine the emotional context for donor and recipient. However, the biography reveals something more heart-based. I wonder if the stiffness of the material is merely a consequence of available information.

We arrive again at the mechanical language of the book’s opening scene that privileges the scientific over the tender, the medical detail over the man experiencing the moment. The themes of erasure and experimentation thread through the book, and the discomfort of the arrangement probes an awareness in the reader. The cultural thread of transplant is measured in quacks, innovators and medical somersaults, told through the voice of a historian handling dense levels of research. Much has been written about this subject, but with Spare Parts Paul Craddock has achieved something unique: a serious, entertaining and thoroughly researched work that usefully sets the history of transplantation in the context of the evolution of ideas about the human body. That these omissions are worthy of mention is a tribute to the overall excellence of the book. Nor is there any mention of xenotransplantation, the history of (mostly disastrous) attempts to transplant animal organs into humans. Craddock does not explore the furious moral debate that engulfed transplantation in the 1960s, when concerns over the ethics of organ donation led to nothing less than the redefinition of what it means to be dead or alive. one of the surprises of this 'surprising history' is what has been left out. The chapters on blood transfusion and tooth transplantation achieve an equally happy synthesis of intellectual and medical history, drawing on Cartesian philosophy, Vitalism and the remarkable inventions of Jacques de Vaucanson, who constructed automata that included a realistic defecating duck. Craddock’s explanation of how this knowledge made its way from a coastal village in Calabria to the great university cities of Europe encompasses ancient agriculture, the Galenic doctrine of the four bodily humours, and an illuminating digression about Renaissance gardens.

Spare Parts by Paul Craddock