"Now, I am a proper human being": kidney transplantation in Cyprus

By exploring kidney transplantation as a social process, I describe the variety of lived experience of transplantation and explain how the sociocultural and medical context among Greek-Cypriots on the island of Cyprus works as a template of reference and understanding for this surgery. Patients understand kidney transplantation as a means for the return to normality, as the mechanism to become "proper human beings" (σωστóς άνθρωπoς), able to fulfill social obligations and achieve important cultural goals. Such perceptions reflect medical discourses on the island, which present kidney transplantation as the mechanism to enable a return to normal social life.