THE ORGAN THIEVES: THE SHOCKING STORY OF THE FIRST HEART TRANSPLANT IN THE SEGREGATED SOUTH Chip Jones. New York, NY: Gallery Books, 2020, 389 pages.

Abstract

On May 25, 1968, the heart of Bruce Tucker was transplanted into Joseph G. Klett at the Medical College of Virginia (MCV) Hospital. This was recorded as the world’s 16th heart transplant during a time when there was a feverish race for a successful heart transplant program. What made this transplant concerning is that Mr. Tucker was a working-class Black man, Mr. Klett was a successful White business man, and Mr. Tucker’s family was unaware of the “donation” at the time that it occurred. Mr. Tucker suffered a traumatic head injury after falling off of a 3-foot wall the day before. Mr. Tucker’s brother, William, sued MCV and lost at the hands of an all-White jury. The events surrounding the transplant and the subsequent legal case are detailed in The Organ Thieves. In The Organ Thieves, the author presents a historical account of a disturbing confluence of issues, many of which remain relevant today: access to healthcare; distrust of the healthcare establishment; the moral, ethical, and legal complexities of organ donation and transplantation; the heart transplant race; and physician/hospital authority at the expense of patient rights. The book provided a thorough description of how MCV’s growth relied on the theft of human bodies for purposes of dissection and medical experimentation. This sordid past cultivated fear and distrust in the Black community toward MCV, which is the backdrop in which Mr. Tucker’s heart was removed. There were other strengths of the book such as the rich description of the role of this legal case in advancing the legal definition of death that exists today. However, there are three concerns about The Organ Thieves. First, Mr. Tucker’s voice is absent from the book. We learn superficial things about him such as his occupation, employer, income, family structure, and hometown, but we learn little about who he was as a person. The reader is left wanting to know more about his previous interactions with the healthcare establishment, what kind of personality he had, and his relationship with his family. In the Afterward of the book, the author acknowledged his unsuccessful attempt to interview Mr. Tucker’s son, but this explanation does little to fill the noticeable void. Second, the civil unrest of the time was addressed only tangentially. There was an overemphasis on factors that contextualize the transplant race (e.g., overly detailed descriptions of space missions and Lyndon B. Johnson’s poor health), while considerably less attention was paid to the context that might shape decisions about the value of human life. Mr. Tucker’s race and social class mattered. The socio-political context of that time dictated how race and class would intersect to determine the value of human life. The Civil Rights Movement was at its height with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. just the month before. Jim Crow laws provided structural, political, and cultural legitimization to the dehumanization of Black Americans.1Wilson CA. Metaracism: Explaining the persistence of racial inequality. Lynne Rienner, Boulder, CO1985Google Scholar It is well known that racist paradigms bias scientists and clinicians alike;2Washington HA. Medical Apartheid: The dark history of medical experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial times to the present. Doubleday, New York2006Google Scholar yet these issues were addressed only superficially by the author. Finally, the author inaccurately described the Tuskegee Syphilis study as one in which “the US Public Health Service recruited hundreds of African American men and gave them the painful, fatal disease.” It is well established that the Public Health Service studied the effects of untreated syphilis,3Jones JH. Bad blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis experiment. The Free Press, New York1981Google Scholar but this type of basic inaccuracy raises questions about whether there were others in the book. In summary, The Organ Thieves made good on its promise to explore medical ethics. Because William Tucker’s case against MCV focused on whether the removal of his heart terminated his brother’s life, so too did the book. This was squarely a legal question that was ultimately decided in court, regardless of whether one agrees with the decision. But historians and scholars of the medical and social sciences are left wondering how issues of race and class inequality contextualized the surgeons’ decision to remove Mr. Tucker’s heart. The author of this manuscript has no conflicts of interest to disclose as described by the American Journal of Transplantation.