Lists in Flux, Lives on Hold? Technologies of Waiting in Liver Transplant Medicine
This chapter examines waiting in liver transplant medicine, a field characterized by immediacy, urgency and delay. By taking a close look at waiting lists, allocating algorithms and mobile phones, it engages with the technological and material features th
- PDF / 251,305 Bytes
- 23 Pages / 419.528 x 595.276 pts Page_size
- 34 Downloads / 193 Views
Introduction: On Top of a Mountain Getting comfortable in his armchair, Arthur took another quick glance at the mobile phone on the coffee table next to him. While I was familiar with this glance from other social contexts—just quickly checking the phone before, or even during, a conversation—this look of his carried an existential urgency and uncertain expectation that shed light on the particularities of liver transplants. ‘It wasn’t that long ago’, Arthur sighed, ‘I had this terrible nightmare; I was on top of a mountain, enjoying the fresh air and the amazing view when my phone suddenly rang’. It was his transplant clinic calling him, telling him that he had to come in immediately because they finally had a donor liver for him. ‘But standing on the mountain top, it was impossible for me to make it in time to the J. Rehsmann (B) Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland Department of Health Professions, Bern University of Applied Science, Bern, Switzerland © The Author(s) 2021 C. Vindrola-Padros et al. (eds.), Immobility and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4976-2_2
15
16
J. Rehsmann
hospital’, Arthur said and shook his head in disbelief. It was there on this mountain top that he missed his chance for a transplant. In this chapter, I want to use Arthur’s relation to his mobile phone in his dreams and his everyday life to unpack the ambivalent relationship between mobility and immobility when waiting for a transplant. Based on ethnographic research in Germany, I focus on the time before transplantation to discuss the role technologies play in the field of liver transplants—a field that is characterized by uncertainties, urgency and delay. In this particular temporality of transplant medicine, such technologies as mobile phones become a critical feature that shapes the waiting experiences of patients like Arthur Berger1 by mediating hope for a life-saving donor liver. Understanding waiting as a temporal experience that is shaped by hope, uncertainties and expectations, I scrutinize how the high-tech medical treatment of liver transplants works as a ‘hope-generating machine’ (Nuijten 2003, 16). In what follows, I take a closer look at the crucial technological features of this hope-generating machine: how they are constituted, how they relate to each other, and how they affect patients. Inspired by Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star’s (2000) work on information infrastructures and classificatory practices, I discuss the waiting list as an invisible infrastructure and classifying technology of this hope-generating machine. Addressing the issue of visibility brings the materiality of lists to mind, and I delineate how waiting lists for transplants differ from common understandings of lists as a fixed, stable order, documented on paper. Furthermore, I show how these specially configured lists are based on the invisible workings of a complex computer algorithm. Handing decisions over to allocation algorithms makes it difficult to understand the workings of the waiting
Data Loading...
