A review by book_rascal
The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in America's Segregated South by Chip Jones

challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

5.0

 

This book covers a lot more than just that one incident. Chip Jones starts out with a brief history of medicine in Amarica and VMC as well. Graverobbers called resurrectionists had a booming business selling corpses to the university just like they did to all the medical schools. This caused riots and unrest in many northern schools. Since VMC located in Richmond Va. they felt they had an advantage in the number of bodies they could acquire for dissection. Many of these corpses were slaves and poor whites that no one cared about and they actually advertised the medical school as having materials for dissection in abundance. Looking back this is a dark start for this school. 

During segregation many POC didn’t get the same level of healthcare as rich white folk. They had their own hospital that was awful. Eventually the end of segregation was supposed to fix that but it still wasn’t the same level for everyone.  

By the 1950’s doctors all over became obsessed with figuring out how to do heart transplants. Dr Lower came to VCM to continue his work with transplanting dog hearts with the goal to eventually work on humans. His colleague Dr Hume had been doing kidney transplants so he had some experience with organ transplants. Their biggest problem was organ rejection and it killed a lot of patients.  

In 1968 Bruce Tucker a black man fell off a wall while drinking and fractured his skull. He was treated in the er and then had a craniotomy and a tracheotomy. At the same time a white business man Mr. Klett was in the hospital with a failing heart. The surgeons decided that this was the opportunity they had been waiting for do a human heart transplant.  

Some effort to find Mr. Tuckers family was done but when they were unable to find anyone quickly the doctors declared him brain dead and decided to do the operation without consent from his next of kin. Not enough effort was put into finding his family and they declared him brain dead after one flatline EEG. 

His brother found out where he was and what had happened too late to say goodbye or give his consent to the operation. He called a lawyer about it and the lawyer filed a civil case against the hospital and everyone involved. This was the first time a case was widely publicized that involved questioning when a person is dead. The ruling in the case went on to help define the new definition of death in legislation.  

The biggest question I ask is would this have happened if Mr. Tucker had been white and Mr. Klett black? Would the doctors have been so quick to act without consent from the family? The racial inequality in Richmond and other parts of the country contributed to this and other injustices at the time.  

This is a great book that sheds light on an episode in American medical history that has been overlooked. This is definitely worth the read.