摘要

In this article we explore how the Spanish written press - ABC, La Vanguardia, and Blanco y Negro - and the official newsreel No-Do, created and disseminated a narrative about heart transplantations at the end of the 1960s. We consider how Franco's regime used Christiaan Barnard's heart transplants to legitimize the Spanish dictatorship and as a means of signifying scientific progress, modernization and national pride. The Spanish press created the plot of the first transplantations like that of a television series, presenting daily installments on the patients' progress, dramatizing the stories and ensuring the public's emotional attachment. The three main characters in the story: donors, patients and surgeons, formed a symbolic, indivisible narrative triangle endowed with singular meaning. This Spanish narrative of organ transplant technology was deployed through what we have called a tale of two countries, that, emulating the South African's success, constructed in Martinez-Bordiu, Franco's son-in-law, a home-grown, masculine scientific personality capable of performing heart surgery and endorsing Franco's investment in scientific modernization.

  • 出版日期2015-8