HEALTH
The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South On African Americans’ distrust of the medical system BY ABU ISMA’IL
T
he inequities in the American health care system have been well documented by Harriet A. Washington, “Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present” (2006); J. H. Jones and Tuskegee Institute, “Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment” (1981); and other authors over the decades. One of the latest additions to this disturbing literature is Chip Jones, whose “The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South” (2020) seems to align itself with ideals of the Black Lives Matter movement. In Time (Aug. 18, 2020), Jones noted, “The legacy of second-class medical treatment for Black people across the United States can still be seen, not least in the disproportionately high death rate of Black Americans from Covid-19. And the scars left behind for generations of families like
the Tuckers can be seen in the suspicions many African Americans still harbor about getting tested for the virus.” Jones, a much-awarded journalist and Pulitzer Prize nominee, reveals how a coterie of Southern White hospital personnel stealthily acquired a person’s heart for a transplant operation (see Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” 2020). “Thieves,” “Shocking” and “Segregated South” are the inflammatory and accusatory terms. It presents the scenario of the first heart transplant performed in Richmond. On May 24, 1968, a Black man named Bruce Tucker was rushed to the Medical College of Virginia (MCV) in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederate States of America. According to the author, by 1968 “MCV had only recently integrated its hospital wards. Given the local tensions between the black community and the white-dominated government and police [let alone the
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urban areas of the United States in general], this was not a good time for a black man like Bruce Tucker to be rushed into an emergency room with a severe head injury,” writes Jones. Tucker, 54, and some of his buddies were enjoying each other’s company on a Friday afternoon and getting a little buzz from a shared bottle of wine behind a gas station around 5:00 p.m. The official story says that he fell off a “three-foot-high” brick wall and hit his head. The ambulance driver said that earlier in the day Tucker had a seizure but refused to go to the hospital. It’s not unlikely that he fell asleep due to the alcohol and being tired after a full day of work. So he arrived at MCV in his work clothes — he worked at an egg-packaging plant — and smelled of alcohol. After the physicians discovered that his brain had shifted, his skull was cracked and he had a severe bruise at the base of his brain, within roughly three hours the doctors drilled a hole in his skull for a craniotomy and one into his windpipe, a tracheotomy. By 1:00 p.m., Saturday, however, Tucker was “dead from a neurological standpoint.” He was brain dead, but he still had a heartbeat, a pulse, and was breathing via a ventilator. Life support was turned off at 3:30 p.m. Three minutes later Tucker was formally pronounced biologically dead. Twenty minutes later, his heart was inserted into another patient. By 5:00 p.m. one of Tucker’s kidneys was made available for an out-of-state hospital transplant, and the other one was stored for MCV’s use. This operation took place about six months after Dr. Christiaan Barnard’s epoch-making heart transplant surgery in Cape Town, South Africa. In the case of Bruce Tucker as the donor, however, the doctors had not informed the family or obtained its consent. Jones had originally intended to write about the heart transplant race of the 1960s. He changed his focus, however, after discovering materials related to Tucker’s death in his own hometown of Raleigh, Virginia.
