The Organ Thieves

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

The 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 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.

The hospital claimed that it had tried — but failed — to contact the family, despite the fact that Tucker’s brother had called the hospital three times. Its subsequent decision to treat the deceased as an unclaimed body was clearly a breach of the law, because the state’s Unclaimed Bodies Act required a 24-hour waiting period before a corpse can be used for academic purposes.

During a book interview, Jones stated, “As a person who came from a white, mid-

THE OPENING SECTION, “ROOTS,” INTRODUCES US TO THE EARLY HISTORY OF GRAVE-ROBBING AND BODY-SNATCHING IN THE U.S. AND EUROPE. CADAVERS WERE NEEDED FOR ANATOMICAL STUDIES WITHIN MEDICAL SCHOOLS. THE PEOPLE WHO SUPPLIED THEM WERE EUPHEMISTICALLY AND CUSTOMARILY KNOWN AS “RESURRECTIONISTS” AND “DEMONSTRATORS.” SUCH PEOPLE WORKED FOR OR WERE ACTUAL MEDICAL PERSONNEL.

dle-class home, I simply had no idea of the long, gruesome history of injustice in the medical arena for Black Americans” (Our Time Press: Q&A with Chip Jones, Sept. 11, 2020). His text provides the relevant background of all the main characters and of the heart transplant movement. The subtheme of racism abetted the striving to perfect the heart transplant methodology, for with it would come prestige, admiration and self-fulfillment [the author provided no evidence for that assertion] that would accrue to the surgeons.

The opening section, “Roots,” introduces us to the early history of grave-robbing and body-snatching in the U.S. and Europe. Cadavers were needed for anatomical studies within medical schools. The people who supplied them were euphemistically and customarily known as “resurrectionists” and “demonstrators.” Such people worked for or were actual medical personnel.

The cadavers used throughout American medical schools were usually those of Blacks and impoverished Whites. Richmond was one of the best places for acquiring such study materials. After all, it was “the largest slave market in the New World except for New Orleans.”

The second section, mostly devoted to the transplant race, MCV’s history and its personnel, relates that as late as 1964, “MCV hospitals were not integrated, were still socially segregated, [and were] racially segregated.” Although the school of medicine had admitted six African-Americans to its class scheduled to graduate in 1962, none of them were allowed to attend the alumni social hour, a buffet luncheon and other graduating class events — a reality that the author called an example of “the school’s apartheid policy” — even Charles F. “Charlie” Christian, who had the highest academic standing in the 88-member class.

Part three, the book’s most exciting and perhaps saddest part, relates Tucker’s funeral and his mother’s reaction upon learning that her son’s heart and kidneys had been removed.

Adopting an hourly diary fashion, Jones recounts Tucker’s last hours from right before “The Fall” until his brother William’s arrival at St. Philip Hospital, MCV’s hospital for “colored people.” Dressed in his coat and tie because “[h]e wanted to look presentable,” he was using crutches, having “contracted polio in his youth.” Upon reaching the second floor, he was told something he wasn’t prepared to hear: His brother had died “four hours ago.”

Attorney L. Douglas Wilder, a future governor of Virginia, represented the Tucker family’s suit against MCV. The recipient, Joseph Klett, died about a week after the operation.

MCV’s second heart transplant operation

St. Philip Hospital took place on Aug. 24, 1968. Louis Russell received the heart Robert Clarence Brown, 17, who had been shot in the head. Both men were African American. Russell, who became longest living heart recipient — six years — died on Nov. 24, 1974.

When Jones talks about the early days of cadaver suppliers and “resurrectionists,” he notes, “Underlying the mayhem were the nation’s earliest protests about why black lives matter” (italicized for emphasis). On another website he says, “As the Black Lives Matter movement leads a much-needed reckoning and conversation about systemic racism, I hope the story of the early days of heart transplantation serves as a reminder of just how literally those words need to be taken, and the importance of taking every life—and death—seriously” (https://time. com/5880419/heart-transplant-segregation/). On his LinkedIn page (dated 2018), he states that something or someone persuaded him to have a descriptive, aggressive title: “Now I’m writing my fourth book, “Heartless,” about the heart transplant race of the 1960s and the epic trial in 1972 ....”

Although the author paints no one with an “all bad” brush, he does label the specific practices and actions with such a brush. He is also admitting his ignorance of how his fellow Whites treated Blacks in toto until he started looking into it. Using specific words to convey exactly what he means, his text seeks to open its readers’ eyes as to what was done in the name of medicine. Appropriate descriptive terms would include “sensitive,” “traditionally morally based,” “discerning” and the like.

As Jones informs us, “It’s good that today’s medical school students are hearing about the Tucker case, alongside other examples of ‘historical trauma’ caused by America’s health care system.” For Muslims who are American and Black, confronting ethnic-based injustice requires believers not to use remedies that resemble those of our non-Muslim counterparts.

When a society in general and a Muslim society in particular has to endure khizi (يزخ disgrace), dhilla (ةـلذ humiliation) and maskana (ةنكسم misery) and poverty, God tells us first to examine ourselves, for as 2:61 and 2:85 state, such hardships may be a result of our own transgressions. ih