The Organ Thieves

Hello Friends and Readers

My work on The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South started several years ago after I read about the work of two medical pioneers in kidney and heart transplantation, David Hume and Richard Lower. These legendary surgeons once practiced medicine in the city where I’ve worked as a newspaper reporter, magazine editor, and in other communication posts: Richmond, Virginia.

When I heard that this dynamic duo at the Medical College of Virginia had trained the doctor who ultimately performed the world’s first successful human heart transplant in late 1967 – Dr. Christiaan Barnard of South Africa – I began to probe the events of May 25, 1968. That was the day Lower and Hume conducted their own historic operation – the first heart transplant in Virginia and sixteenth in the world.

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As a veteran newsman who spent five straight years writing investigative articles shedding light on the secrets of Richmond’s tobacco giant, Philip Morris, I’ve always been intrigued by what happens when large institutions make decisions that affect average people. I soon noticed something missing in MCV’s early version of the story of its memorable transplant: the identity of the man who had given up the heart transplanted into the body of an ailing Virginia businessman. Who was he and why was his name left out of the earliest accounts of the operation?

Back in 1968, Bruce Tucker’s name finally was revealed through the dogged reporting of local science writer Beverley “Bev” Orndorff, who later became my colleague at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. As I read Bev’s early articles and MCV’s news releases of the day, I kept wondering about the early omission of Tucker’s name.

That led to other questions and revelations. For example, after the transplant and Bruce Tucker’s death, his brother, William, contacted L. Douglas Wilder, a successful young black attorney. He began to investigate the circumstances of the death and considered taking legal action on the family’s behalf. Wilder would go on to become the first elected African American governor in the nation’s history.

During the three years of research and writing that went into The Organ Thieves, I kept discovering other pieces of a growing puzzle. Among them:

The tangible sense of horror and grief that William Tucker experienced after hospital officials finally informed him of his brother’s death – conveniently withholding the vital information that his heart and kidneys had been taken from him without any prior notification.
The fact that, among doctors I interviewed who were on the scene, Tucker was seen as a “charity patient” who probably wouldn’t pay his bills. This fit a broader pattern of discriminatory behavior toward black patients across the U.S. health care system at the time. Sadly, this legacy of second-rate care for African Americans and other minority groups continues to be a major source of concern during the COVID-19 crisis.
Through court records and interviews with physicians, lawyers, and journalists, I provide a detailed, minute-by-minute account of the final moments of Bruce Tucker’s life.
There was an unrelenting pressure put on Dr. Lower, one of the world’s most renowned heart transplant surgeons, to perform a heart transplant at MCV. This pressure, especially from David Hume, mounted after they lost the heart transplant race to Barnard on December 3, 1967. Their disappointment was exacerbated by the fact that, only a year before, the South African surgeon had spent three months at the Richmond medical college studying its cutting-edge research program. When Barnard became an international celebrity, it was well known that he had employed the very same surgical techniques that Lower hoped to use someday.

As I tried to better understand the historical context of the 1968 operation, I learned about the widespread skepticism among African Americans about the heart transplants in the 1960s. Governor Wilder described his own upbringing in Richmond near the medical college, where he was warned not to approach at night because “the student doctors will get you.” There also was scathing humor by comedians such as Richard Pryor and Dick Gregory. Los Angeles Times columnist Sandra Haggarty wrote about the widely held view that “a brother’s likely to go in the hospital with a cold and come out without a heart.”

The Organ Thieves explains how the events of the 1960s in Richmond had historical parallels in the very foundation of American medicine — including grave robbing that occurred in early to mid-19th century New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Using archival records, I learned how Dr. Augustus Warner, the founder of the first medical school in Richmond (the precursor to MCV) bragged in 1837 about how slavery would contribute to the growth of the fledgling school of medicine. Referring to slavery (“the peculiarity of our institutions”), Dr. Augustus Warner bragged about how “materials for dissection can be obtained in abundance,” either from enslaved blacks dying from disease and exhaustion around Virginia, or from “the number of negroes employed in factories” [who] “will furnish materials for the support of an extensive hospital.”

While this was true at other hospitals around the country, it still sent chills down my spine to read this in the medical school’s archives across the street from the same Capitol grounds where the state’s first black governor would take his oath of office in 1990.

Bruce Tucker, photo courtesy of RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH

Moving forward, I revisited the strange series of events in 1994 when MCV’s past literally poked up through the mud. Construction workers were horrified to find skeletons and even human flesh in a well used as a “bone pit” below what is now the front entrance to the Kontos medical building.

Thankfully, today in Richmond, a joint public/private effort is underway to study and honor the lives of enslaved Americans whose bodies were stolen and dumped by the medical college in the 19th century. The effort is bearing fruit. I hope that The Organ Thieves helps inform such vital conversations to address the disturbing issues of the past that still trouble our nation.

“In this captivating true story, journalist Chip Jones outlines how ambitious surgeons took a black man’s heart without his family’s consent and implanted it into a white man’s body in the name of scientific progress. The Organ Thieves is a gripping exposé unveiling racism at the heart of medical advances.”
—Kristen Green, nationally bestselling author of Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward: A Family, a Virginia Town, a Civil Rights Battle

Chris Baker lived and worked in the Egyptian Building, where he brought stolen bodies for use in MCV’s anatomy classes. He was on the hospital’s payroll well into the twentieth century, living with his wife and son in the basement. SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, TOMPKINS-MCCAW LIBRARY, VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIVERSITY

Transplant surgeon David Hume was recruited from Harvard in the mid-1950s to raise MCV’s stature. – RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH

Lower with fellow heart researcher, Richard J. Cleveland, in the lab in 1966. – SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, TOMPKINS-MCCAW LIBRARY, VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIVERSITY

St. Philip Hospital – SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, TOMPKINS- MCCAW LIBRARY, VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIVERSITY

MCV Hospital where Bruce Tucker was brought to its emergency entrance. – SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, TOMPKINS-MCCAW LIBRARY, VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIVERSITY

Businessman Joseph Klett had a long history of heart disease before Dr. Lower began treating him. – RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH

Geoffrey Mann, Virginia’s chief medical examiner in the 1960s, studies a skull. He left his assistant in charge before MCV’s surgeons decided to try their first human heart transplant. – RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH

Sen. L. Douglas Wilder makes a point in a 1978 Virginia Senate hearing. – RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH

The original foundation of the Egyptian Building was laid bare during construction of a new medical sciences building in 1994. – SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, TOMPKINS-MCCAW LIBRARY, VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIVERSITY

"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." --Publishers Weekly