Labile Bodies: A Hospital Ethnography of Medical Professionals’ Struggles in Deceased Organ Donation

This article presents an ethnographic study of the donor body in deceased organ donation. Drawing on the science and technology studies’ incitement to study bodies being enacted and acted upon in situated practices, I explore the body being done and becoming undone in the practices of organ procurement at a Catalan hospital. The hospital has uniquely high rates of organ donation and transplantation, and deceased organ donation has become routinised and integrated into everyday hospital activities. I attend ethnographically to the medical professionals’ accounts of and interactions with bodies and organs in their work dealing with both donors after brain death diagnosis and uncontrolled donors after circulatory death diagnosis. During fieldwork, I followed the struggles of the transplant coordination team grappling with unruly bodies under different maintenance technologies. The body being done in these hospital practices is an active and unstable materiality that must be contended with: a labile body, or a fragile assemblage of interdependent functions, requiring multiple interventions provided by a host of dedicated hospital practitioners. The article shows that staying close to the medical professionals’ situated accounts is a valuable route to gaining novel understandings of the donor body.