The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South

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. (Aug.)