Against a global backdrop of wartime suffering and postwar hope, Borrowing Life gathers the personal histories of the men and women behind the team that enabled and performed the modern medical miracle of the world's first successful organ transplant.
Shelley Fraser Mickle is an award-winning novelist whose first novel, The Queen of October, was a New York Times Notable Book and selected by Library Journal as one of the ten best adult books suitable for young adults. Her novel Replacing Dad won an America's Writers Award in Chicago and was adapted for film. Her nonfiction book for middle-grade readers, Barbaro, America's Horse, won a Bank Street Award, and American Pharaoh, Triple Crown Champion, was chosen by the New York Public Library as one of the best nonfiction books for children in 2017. From 2000 to 2006 she was a commentator for National Public Radio's "Morning Edition." Her husband trained under the Brigham surgeons who are the focus of Borrowing Life.
Novelist and biographer Mickle (American Pharaoh) traces the
long road to the first successful human kidney transplant, in 1954,
in this involving chronicle. Avoiding medical jargon, Mickle uses
her storytelling skills to bring the doctors and patients involved
to life. She writes particularly admiringly of the three
individuals central to the breakthrough: Boston surgeons Francis
Moore and Joseph Murray and London researcher Peter Medawar, the
latter two both Nobel Prize winners for their work. She captures
distinguishing features of their lives-Moore's patrician New
England roots; the ostracism which the Lebanese-British Medawar
sometimes endured due to his "Arab blood"-and
personalities-Murray's cheerful, almost childlike nature. She also
conveys the determination they needed to overcome the problem of
autoimmune rejection of foreign organs, over the course of many
surgeries. Mickle provides biographies for many of the patients
involved, including Richard Herrick, whose genetic compatibility
with his identical twin, Ronald, proved the key, allowing the
pivotal 1954 operation to take place. Readers will find this an
uplifting look at the quest to make transplants the routine
lifesaving procedures they have become.
-Publishers Weekly
Admiring biographies of a scientist, two surgeons, and several
patients whose lives came together in a 1954 kidney transplant, the
first that succeeded, heralding a medical revolution that continues
to this day.Award-winning novelist Mickle (The Occupation of Eliza
Goode, 2013, etc.) turns her attention to nonfiction while making
generous use of her storytelling skills. Her heroes are Peter
Medawar (1915-1987), a British scientist considered the father of
transplantation, who discovered the phenomenon of acquired
immunological tolerance-conditions under which the body would not
reject a foreign tissue; and Francis Moore (1913-2001), the
youngest chairman of surgery in Harvard's history, who aggressively
supported many breakthrough techniques, including those of Joseph
Murray (1919-2012) who performed the first successful transplant, a
kidney, between identical twins, in 1954. More significantly,
Murray did the same with an unrelated donor in 1962. In her
enthusiastic narrative, Mickle pays close attention to patients,
especially Charles Woods, who suffered catastrophic burns in a
World War II plane crash and underwent years of surgery, many by
Dr. Murray, to restore his face and hands. During his later
experiments, Murray remembered that foreign skin transplants lasted
much longer on the debilitated Woods. Readers will enjoy the
author's lucid account of the history of transplants and the
difficulties faced by the pioneers, and she also offers generous
accounts of their courtships, marriages, and offspring. At the end
of the book, Mickle, whose husband trained under Moore and Murray,
includes a chronology and instructions on becoming a kidney donor.
"Over a decade," writes the author, her subjects "pioneered the
giving and taking of organs that one of the surgeons called
'spare-parts surgery,' or borrowing life, which in no way belittled
the ultimate gift of retrieving life for one so close to losing
it."An irresistible if often gruesome account of a great medical
struggle that featured a happy ending.
-Kirkus Reviews
Mickle (American Pharaoh) uses her novelist's skills for
characterization and plot in this well-researched story of Charles
Woods, an eccentric World War II pilot severely burned in a plane
accident; Joe Murray, his young doctor at Valley Forge Hospital
with only nine months of surgical training; Francis Moore, his
Harvard-trained boss; and Peter Medawar, a zoology graduate student
at Oxford who used his biological training to create successful
skin grafts for British soldiers injured during the war. Inspired
by Woods's determination to live despite several surgeries and
severe pain, Murray and Moore's work on skin grafts and the body's
acceptance or rejection of them led to work on kidney
transplantation, which had the same obstacles, at Brigham Hospital
in Boston. Medawar's key discoveries helped them succeed with the
first successful organ transplant at Boston's Peter Brent Brigham
Hospital in 1954. VERDICT A thrilling and riveting story of
determination, perseverance, and compassion that makes medical
history accessible.
-Library Journal
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