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

In the hands of some writers, this would have become a powerful narrative, weaving one family’s tragedy into a nuanced panorama of race, medical innovation and ethics, scientific ambition and the law. But Chip Jones’s The Organ Thieves, which tells the story of what happened to Bruce Tucker, disappoints, with its pedestrian language, telling omissions and hagiographic portrayals of medical actors … Jones doesn’t stop to interject at key moments in the narrative … Such coercion is and was unethical, and should not just be treated as another story detail … Moreover, it should have been made abundantly clear that no amount of money could have bought an African-American a bed in a standard ward … What happened to Tucker matters for reasons far beyond the appropriation of one man’s organs … The author describes some of this key history of body appropriation, but fails to engage with the ethics of these practices, explaining away the moral lapses of researchers as a result of systemic racism and professional ambition … the book fails to engage with such questions, and Jones avoids grappling with them by claiming there were no ethical strictures governing medical practice and research at the time … He is not the first writer to voice this fiction, sometimes deployed by apologists to normalize the abysmal treatment of African-Americans … Instead of engaging with questions of transplantation ethics based on documented history, the author focuses on fictional accounts, extensively invoking the fantastic Gothic writing of Edgar Allan Poe and African-American myths about ‘night doctors’ who steal bodies. Unfortunately, he doesn’t illuminate how the myth relates to the documented bodysnatching from Black cemeteries by doctors, an elision which consigns warranted African-American fears to the realm of horror stories and folklore … This ahistoric approach is most dismaying, especially in airy of telling errors that stud the narrative … tells an essential story passably well, but its evasions and occasional missteps hobble its power to illuminate.

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