Sibylle Obrecht, Rejection or tolerance? The first heart transplantations and the construction of the "self". The workshop will take place Wednesday, December 12th, at 6PM in the Levinthal Room of the Stanford Humanities Center. Abstract: In December 1967, Christiaan Barnard and his team transplanted the heart of a young woman into the body of a dangerously ill man, and three months later, the heart of a black South African into the body of a white compatriot. Reports on these surgeries began the enormous media coverage on heart transplantation medicine by the end of the 1960s, exceeded only by the coverage of the Apollo moon landing. Although often affirming value of the transplantations, newspaper articles and TV reports emphasized ethical problems raised by the trangression of various cultural and medical boundaries by the new medical technology: Were the physicians really authorized to redefine the boundary between life and death? What were the prospects and limitations of surgically reshaping the body? Did the transplantations hurt the integrity of the human organism? Also, the spectacular surgeries provided a good opportunity for the media to relate to the role of "individuality" and "difference" (e.g. between "races", "classes" and "sexes"), issues which were intensely discussed and politically contested at that time. Medical, political and social discourses on differences echoed in the narratives of the transformation of the bodies and the lives of donors and recipients, such as in articles describing how a widow offered the heart of her underpriviledged, black husband to a rich white man in order to save his live. Analyzing the representations of the earliest heart transplantations (performed in the late 1960s by Barnard and other surgeons) in medical-scientific discourse and in Swiss newspaper and magazine reports, I will focus on the reconceptualizations and reworkings of the embodied character of individuality in Western cultures. How were differences between individuals inscribed into the human organism? In which parts and functions of the body were they located? I will briefly examine the significance that hearts and brains were attributed for defining the "self" and then concentrate on the crucial contribution of the developing transplantation immunology to the redrawing of the boundaries between bodies and their environment. In this interdisciplinary field, physical individuality was seen as the result of a process of differentiation between "self" (body) and "non-self" (external world or the transplanted organ). The reaction of patients¼ "immune self" to the implanted graft was considered decisive for the outcome of the treatment. Both physicians and researchers on the one hand and journalists on the other depicted the major challenge of transplantation medicine --the resistance of the material body showing an "immune response"- in a imagery of warfare: The well-informed body, recognizing the implanted cells as "foreign," actively tried to "defend" its integrity by "attacking" the "invaders." In order to overcome this rejection process, the physicians and basic researchers referred to the inherited and acquired patterns that organized the differences between "self" and "non-self" on a molecular and cellular level. They attempted to manipulate and prevent the immune reactions by either suppressing the recipients¼ response or, in a more sophisticated manner, by finding donors and recipients who shared some genetic traits. But notwithstanding the immense efforts to save the patients¼ lives, the results of the heart transplantations performed in the late 1960s turned out to be disappointing. For the time being, the body defended its biological integrity ‚or, to phrase it less militantly but closer to the world of information and virtuality‚ it denied access.