The Tell-Tale Heart Transplant
By: Jason Park
Tags: History, Reading, Medicine, Racism, Books

The Tell-Tale Heart Transplant

A review of Chip Jones’ stunning new book, *The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South*

You get a phone call that your brother is in the hospital. You rush to go to him, get a couple more scrambled messages about how he had a head injury at work and is now in a recovery room. When you get the next update, he is dead. When you take his body to the funeral home, you get another batch of shocking news: his heart and kidneys are missing. What do you think? What do you do?

Now, to add on to all of that, you are a Black man in segregated Virginia in 1967. What do you think? What do you do?

“They took my brother’s heart!” the man on the other end of the line exclaimed in horror.

This is the engine behind Chip Jones’ The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South. The Black man is William Tucker. His brother, Bruce Tucker, went in to the Medical College of Virginia (MCV) with a head injury and his heart became the 15th heart transplant in world history. He was not a listed donor. His family did not give consent. The reader must wonder (I did) if his head injury was given adequate treatment, after seeing what happened next.

The Egyptian Building (left) and Dooley Hospital (right), where a lot of the events of *The Organ Thieves* took place

Jones’ tome is part a history of MCV, part history of transplantation, another part courtroom drama, and a little dash of archeological excavation. Its flexibility makes the story unique, and the depth of research is simply astounding. It’s been compared to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, now a classic that I am embarassed to say I have not yet read. However, I am very familiar with it (Jones even references the book several times within his text) and to my knowledge Bruce Tucker’s importance to the ethics of heart transplantation and the concept of “brain death” seems just as important as Henrietta Lacks’ posthumous contribution to cancer research. The similarities in the two stories are striking, to say the least.

Jones is clear in his message about what put Bruce Tucker’s family in such a vulnerable situation:

Bruce’s race and socioeconomic circumstances made him vulnerable for organ removal, demonstrated by the simple fact that doctors declared him derelict without making much of an effort to find his family.

But the racial component, though crucially important, does not take up nearly all the oxygen in Jones’s figurative room. The science of heart transplants, of death, and where those connect forms the crux of the intellectual questioning in his account. Does “brain death” count as death, or does death depend on the cessation of breathing and heartbeat? If surgeons were to have followed the Virginia law at the time, they would have had to wait 24 hours after Bruce Tucker’s heart stopped beating to count him surely dead. That would have saved his brother William a lot of heartache, but it would make a heart transplant impossible. As Jones relays in the book, the authors of the 2015 text Transplantation Ethics wrote:

The public policy discussion of how to define death began in earnest in the late 1960s, not long before surgeons were confronted by Bruce Tucker’s case … Now, a half century later, we are still unclear about exactly what it means to be dead.

It’s the paradox of modern science: We can put a dead man’s heart into a living man’s body, but we don’t know exactly what it means to be dead.

If these questions interest you, I implore you to read The Organ Thieves and think deeply about the ethical conundrums presented. They are important to how we define life, who matters, and what is most important when it comes to saving lives with the help of modern science — science which cannot answer every important question.

I borrowed a copy of The Organ Thieves from my local library. Borrow it, request it, or consider donating to your library today.