The Organ Thieves

May 15, 2020
Another sad tale of virulent racism--this time involving the medical community--at the height of the civil rights movement. Jones is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist with deep roots in Virginia's still-divided communities, so the reportage is unsurprisingly solid, and the depths and repercussions of the story he discovered are startling. The author takes the time to put the history of organ transplants and their various failures and successes into context before he arrives at the pivotal event of his narrative. In May 1968, African American factory worker Bruce Tucker fell off a brick wall and fractured his skull. Brought to the Medical College of Virginia's emergency room, Tucker was found to have suffered a grave injury. This caught the attention of Drs. David Hume and Richard Lower, who made the decision to take Tucker's heart and transplant it into Joseph Klett, a white businessman with severe heart disease. From here, the story morphs into something of a sociological mystery. Tucker's family discovered his organs were missing at the funeral home, dogged reporters attempted to chase down the facts, and hospital staff and administrators wrestled with the ethics of what they had done. There was also a hotly contested legal battle that emerged when Tucker's family sued the hospital, igniting a face-off between Jack Russell, known for "defending physicians named in medical malpractice suits," and Doug Wilder, the Tucker family's attorney and "one of the best-known African American trial lawyers practicing in the state capital." This is a powerful story that examines institutional racism, mortality, medical ethics, and the nature of justice for black men living in the American South. The author also offers two chilling codas, one involving the discovery of a mass grave and the other chronicling his search for Tucker's son some 50 years later. A moving exploration of an unthinkable trespass against an innocent man.

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June 29, 2020
In this doggedly reported account, journalist Jones (War Shots) reveals unexpected links between racial inequality and the race to perform Virginia’s first human-to-human heart transplant. On a Friday evening in 1968, African American laborer Bruce Tucker suffered a severe head injury. Taken to a Richmond hospital, he was pronounced dead the next afternoon. Without the knowledge or permission of Tucker’s family, a team led by cardiac surgeon Richard Lower transplanted Tucker’s heart into a white businessman, who initially recovered from the operation but died a week later. Informed by a funeral director that his brother’s heart and kidneys were missing, William Tucker hired lawyer (and future Virginia governor) Doug Wilder to look into the matter. Lower and the other surgeons were eventually cleared in a wrongful death lawsuit, though jurors intended to find the hospital negligent for allowing the procedure to go forward without consent from Tucker’s next of kin, and were only prevented by a statute of limitations. Jones connects the case to the long and sordid history of medical experimentation on African Americans, including the 19th-century practice of procuring medical cadavers from black cemeteries, and explores the tangle of ethical and legal questions around the concept of “brain death.” The result is a dramatic and fine-grained exposé of the mistreatment of black Americans by the country’s white medical establishment. Agent: Peter McGuigan, Foundry.

July 1, 2020

Bruce Tucker was spending time with friends after work in Richmond, VA, in May 1968 when he fell off of a wall and suffered a serious head injury. Hours later, his heart was removed and used in one of the country's earliest heart transplants. Even though his brother worked nearby, the hospital claimed it was unable to locate the patient's family to ask for permission prior to the transplant. Organ Thieves traces the story of Tucker's death, the doctors who pronounced him dead and operated, and the lawsuit that challenged their decisions. Jones, a longtime journalist in Virginia, looks at the history of early American medical schools, which often used illegally obtained African American corpses for anatomy classes. Tucker's story is placed in this tradition, in which the cruelty and indignity of racism continued even after death. Jones also examines early efforts at organ transplantation and the race by doctors, including those at the ambitious Medical College of Virginia, to perform innovative and high-profile transplants. VERDICT With elements of legal and social history, this work is recommended for readers interested in the history of race and racism, and how it relates to medical practice in the United States.--Nicholas Graham, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

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