The title of this profound work conveys the bold, uncertain, and often dangerous adventure in which medical professionals and their organ transplant and dialysis patients are engaged. Built around a series of case studies developed through years of first-hand ethnographic research, The Courage to Fail is the product of collaborative first-hand research concerned with various social phenomena generated by transplantation and dialysis and also by the development and deployment of an artificial heart. The authors examine the individuals involved and the workings and atmosphere of some of the medical centers in which these forms of therapy have been developed. They examine "gift-exchange" dimensions of transplantation: the transcendent and tyrannical aspects of the "gift of life" that transplants entail for donors and recipients -- and for medical professionals as well. They also analyze the dilemma of uncertainty inherent in medicine, which occurs with particular force in the development of such experimental techniques.

1: Patterns in Therapeutic Innovation: Transplantation; 1: Gift Exchange and Gatekeeping; 2: Specialists in Uncertainty: The Problem of Rejection; 3: The Experiment-Therapy Dilemma; 2: The Courage to Fail Ethos; 4: The Physician-Investigator and His Patients; 5: The Heart Transplant Moratorium; 6: The Case of the Artificial Heart; 3: Patterns in Therapeutic Innovation: Dialysis; 7: "To Give Life": A Study of Seattle's Hemodialysis Program; 8: Patient Selection and the Right to Die: Problems Facing Seattle's Kidney Center; 9: Ernie Crowfeather; 4: Changing Perspectives on Transplantation and Dialysis; 10: Transplantation in the 1970s: A Revised Paradigm of Therapeutic Innovation; 11: The Democratization of Dialysis: Public Law 92-603; 12: The Societal Meaning of The Courage to Fail