ABSTRACT
The author's intensive, long-term relationship with the therapeutic innovations and their clinical unfolding has had many of the characteristics anthropologist Margaret Mead identified as inherent to field research, no matter where it is located or what its subject matter may be. Six weeks of field research during the summer of 1981 in the People's Republic of China also had a powerful impact on the authors. During that era of the "four modernizations," China's medical workers had a collective commitment to "serving the patient" by progressively "scaling the heights" of modern medicine. Through the ongoing process of self-scrutiny and self-analysis that participant observation also entails, the authors have recognized that our years in the field have made us more, rather than less, emotionally and morally perturbable. In author's view, the field of organ replacement epitomizes a very different and powerful tendency in the American health care system and in the value and belief system of our society's culture.
