The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks meets Get Out in this “startling…powerful” (Kirkus Reviews) investigation of racial inequality at the core of the heart transplant race. In 1968, Bruce Tucker, a black man, went into Virginia’s top research hospital with a head injury, only to have his heart taken out of his body and put into the chest of a white businessman. Now, in The Organ Thieves, … white businessman. Now, in The Organ Thieves, Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Chip Jones exposes the horrifying inequality surrounding Tucker’s death and how he was used as a human guinea pig without his family’s permission or knowledge.
The circumstances surrounding his death reflect the long legacy of mistreating African Americans that began more than a century before with cadaver harvesting and worse. It culminated in efforts to win the heart transplant race in the late 1960s. Featuring years of research and fresh reporting, along with a foreword from social justice activist Ben Jealous, “this powerful book weaves together a medical mystery, a legal drama, and a sweeping history, its characters confronting unprecedented issues of life and death under the shadows of centuries of racial injustice” (Edward L. Ayers, author of The Promise of the New South).
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Chip Jones is a Pulitzer Prize nominated journalist who brings to life an amazing story a succinct synopsis of which is drawn straight from the subtitle of his book, The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South.
To give readers some background into the story, Jones provides an extensive history, running from the Renaissance to the late nineteenth century, of physicians and artists utilizing the services of “resurrection men” to provide bodies for surgical practice and anatomical research. As a physician myself, I know how important these cadavers are for medical study. Because there were so few cadavers available at my medical school, each was shared by seven students, and we practiced suturing techniques on chickens and pork feet rather than humans.
Complicating this practice are moral, ethical, economic, and racial issues. When the Medical College of Virginia (MCV) was opened, one of the primary reasons for its location was the availability of plenty of cadavers—drawn from the slaves that made up one-third of the community’s population as well as poor whites.
Jones highlights the shameful history of systemic mistreatment of black people in America. People were sometimes kidnapped off the streets, killed, then used for medical research. One of the more blatant examples is the US Public Health Service’s Tuskegee Study which ran from 1932 to 1972 in which 600 impoverished black men, sharecroppers in Macon, Georgia, were told they were getting free health care from the government. Without appropriate written consent, they were instead followed for 40 years as researchers sought to study the natural history of syphilis. And even when penicillin became the standard of care to treat syphilis, these men were denied treatment.
Jones shows how pervasive racism was even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Bruce Tucker, an African American male, was admitted to MCV after sustaining a serious head injury. Unbeknownst to the family, his heart and kidneys were harvested with his heart being transplanted into chest of a White businessman. Tucker’s family was not properly contacted regarding his admission to the hospital nor approached about donating his organs. Only when the mortician prepared Tucker’s body for burial did the family learn of his missing organs.
As a physician, I’m sad to say, I’ve seen blatant racism from my peers directed toward persons of color. Even now racial and ethnic minorities receive substandard health care compared to Whites—even with similar ages, incomes, insurance status, and severity of conditions. Covid-19, for example, disproportionately affects black communities; African Americans die at a rate more than double that of other ethnic groups (50.3 per 100,000 people), compared with 20.7 for whites, 22.9 for Latinos and 22.7 for Asian Americans. Native Americans in New Mexico comprise 11% of the population, but account for 57% of the deaths.
For people wishing to read more about the endemic racism in American medicine, I recommend The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.
For those interested in transplant medicine, try When Death Becomes Life: Notes from a Transplant Surgeon by Joshua D. Mezrich.
For those interested in racist ideas in America, read Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America and other books by Ibram X. Kendi. It is amazing that these outdated ideas of the white race as supreme can be dated back to Aristotle.
I am going to be in the minority on this book. I was expecting it to be an in depth look at the first heart transplant and that’s not what it was. It’s more a history of Medical Schools using cadavers from the poor community. They would go into the graveyards and dig them up, then perform experiments on them.
Starting with the beginning of America, the Medical Schools would use slaves, poor, and indigenous people. Often they would rob the graves of the poorer areas, bc these cemeteries had no guards.
I asked to read this book through Netgalley because it had stated it was the first organ transplant. Imagine that it is 1968, at the height of the Civil Rights area, and your 54 year old brother is taken to the hospital for a head injury. Now imagine your brother spells of alcohol and is unconscious. You would expect him to be taken care of, except, I forgot to mention, he is black. When you finally find out he is at the hospital, you call and get the run around. When you finally make it, you find out he has died. Then you get a call from the funeral home the next day saying his heart and kidney is gone. How would you feel.
This is the true story of Bruce Tucker. In 1968, he was taken to the Medical College of Virginia because of a head injury. That same afternoon, his heart and kidney are giving to two different people. His heart goes to a white guy.
As I said before, I thought this book would go in depth with the case. The family sued. But, it didn’t go that much into depth. Could have been because all court transcripts were lost and the author had to rely on the judges handwritten notes. I don’t know, but to me it’s more of a history of how medical schools have always used cadavers and where those bodies come from.
Thanks to Netgalley for the Kindle version of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.