ABSTRACT
Some of the metamedical phenomena and issues connected with dialysis and transplantation are integrally related to modern societal patterns and to alterations they are at present undergoing. From the perspective, organ transplantation and chronic hemodialysis are merely two of the more techniques that medicine has devised to sustain life and fend off death. Nevertheless, dialysis and transplantation have not simply been heralded as lifesaving developments. The advent of hemodialysis and organ transplantation has highlighted the active, undaunted striving of modern medicine to control death and its growing ability to do so. In various ways, dialysis and transplantation have heightened consciousness of how imperfect and approximate medical understanding of life and death and the distinction between them. Certain factors push the medical profession toward trying to provide dialysis and transplantation to all whose lives might possibly be extended. The development of life-prolonging treatments like dialysis and transplantation has made the existential dimension of the physician's role more manifest.
