People agonized about the heart being “the throne of the soul, the seat of man’s noblest qualities and emotions.” Then a Vatican newspaper weighed in and said that the heart is nothing more than a pump, “a physiological organ,’ and “its function is purely mechanical.” It was sobering to think that there is no more soul or personality in a heart than in a slice of liver. So heart transplants, while expensive affairs, are an accepted procedure nowadays.
More than four decades later, here we are again, wringing our hands over face transplants. Why does the idea of taking one person’s face and transplanting it on another elicit such strong reaction?
Some psychologists think the possibility of assuming someone else identity has been a source of fascination ever since primitive man fashioned his first mast. For those with faces ravaged by disease, accidents, or birth defects, the issue is probably one of life and death, literally or figuratively speaking.
Who among us with normal features can say that being unable to eat or speak properly or having to endure being stared at or even made fun of is not a slow death of some sort? When you can’t leave the house because you dread seeing pity or revulsion in people’s eyes or hearing unkind remarks, what does that say about your quality of life?
The doctors at the forefront of face transplants say that this procedure offers patients a chance to be hole again and perhaps even improve their quality of life.
But nobody can say with any certainty whether the face transplants that have been done on the French woman and the Chinese man will remain without complications years from now. It is in this sense that we are all sailing into uncharted medical water.
