After Novelty: The Mundane Practices of Ensuring a Safe and Stable Supply of Bone

New medical technologies to a great extent use material from human bodies as therapeutic tools. Social science studies of such ‘tools’ have tended to focus on technologies associated with novelty and drama. This paper, in contrast, concerns an old, well-entrenched and ostensibly undramatic technology, bone transfers, that has only recently gained public attention. The history of bone transplants is intertwined with a desire for a safe and stable supply of bone. This desire has a number of rarely debated social implications of relevance to transplant medicine in general: the gradual industrialization of procurement; the institutional production of the view of the body as a dividable resource; the emergence of a notion of scarcity; of body parts as waste; of death as a productive moment in which body parts acquire potential exchange value; and of tensions between an ethics of respect for donors and an ethics of efficient procurement. Historical analysis combined with a contemporary phenomenological approach suggests that the ‘newness’ typically associated with usage of human biological material is not related to transplant technologies as a medical discipline as such, but rather to changes in its social organization and features of the everyday experience of living with the transplant technologies.