Simon Hofmann, Umstrittene Körperteile: Eine Geschichte der Organspende in der Schweiz (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2016), pp. 330, €37.99, paperback, ISBN: 978-3-8376-3232-3.

History of Organ Donation in Switzerland' how organ donation had been perceived, legitimised, criticised, judicially regulated and institutionalised in Switzerland. Hence, what does the history of organ transplantation tell us about the meaning and importance of biomedicine in late modernity? Hofmann presents the reader with a cultural history of organ donation, whereby culture is understood as the totality of all systems, forms and practices by which actors construct their reality as meaningful. The book is written from a social constructivist perspective using discourse analysis as the main tool of interpretation. The book's main focus is on the proliferation of the transplant operations of hearts, livers, lungs and pancreases from humans to humans. One of the puzzles Hofmann tries to solve is the observation that the number of donors began to decline at the same moment that the propagators of organ transplantation started a campaign to enlighten the public in 1987. Hofmann's main hypothesis regarding this decline is that it was last but not least (fictional) stories about organ theft and organ dealing that formed the reality of organ donation in Switzerland. The book is mainly written against three important hypotheses in the historiography of organ transplantation. The first hypothesis sees organ transplantation in the context of an ongoing submission and normalisation. The second hypothesis modulates the history of organ transplantation as one of an increasing commodification and commercialisation, whereas the third one sees organ transplantation as an element of the reification of the human body, taking the differentiation of 'Leib und Körper' as starting point. This differentiation in the German language is difficult to translate; it might be translated as the difference between the experienced or living body and the physiological or biological body. Besides published sources Hofmann also integrates unpublished material in his study. The most important corpus stems from the Swiss Academy for the Medical Sciences (SAMW), including protocols and correspondence between 1968–73 and 1994–5 looking at ethical and medical aspects of transplantations. Furthermore, Hofmann used the archive of the foundation 'Swisstransplant', sources from two hospitals, two public archives and published material from 'journalistic' and popular media. Hofmann sees the inclusion of popular sources like science fiction novels and TV series as one of the key distinctions from other histories of organ transplantation (p. 31). The book tells the history of organ transplantation three times from a different angle. Firstly, from a inner-medical perspective that focuses on the …