The international kidney trade comes to London: 1979-1990

Abstract

In 1980s suburban North London, a small coterie of medical professionals facilitated the sale of kidneys from impoverished live donors to critically ill recipients. Both donors and recipients were recruited from abroad. These arrangements were exposed in 1988, resulting in public scandal, professional disgrace, and the passage of legislation banning the buying and selling of human organs. Seemingly localized, these events in fact were a nexus of national and transnational phenomena related-but not limited-to the growth of commercial medicine in the United Kingdom, patterns of postcolonial migration, flows of international investment capital, the exacerbation of patterns of global wealth and poverty, the rapid advancement of the science of pharmaceutical immunosuppression and, most importantly, the growth of an international market in human tissue and a corresponding public fascination with the workings of that market. This dissertation attempts an explication of that nexus.