A SHOCKING SOUTHERN TALE
New book ‘Organ Thieves’ investigates racial bias in medicine and the shocking details around Virginia’s first heart-transplant surgery
A yearslong journey for a family beset by tragedy and a dramatic legal case form the basis of new book ‘The Organ Thieves.’
William Tucker could not have imagined the loss he felt he could get any worse one particular weekend.
The coming Monday morning, it did.
The Saturday before, May 25, 1968, Tucker’s work phone rang with a whispered voice from the Medical College of Virginia. It said that his brother Bruce was in the Richmond hospital and something strange was going on. As far as William Tucker knew, his 54-yearold brother was fine.
Tucker started a maddening succession of calls to the hospital with no answers. When he showed up a few hours later he was told
Bruce had died. He sat with a seasoned mortician who looked pained about what he had to say about his brother.
“William,” the man said, “his heart is missing. So are his kidneys.”
The revelation began a yearslong journey for the Tucker family, sparked a dramatic legal case and is the basis of the new book “The
Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South.”
In 1968, surgeons at MCV performed Virginia’s first — and the world’s 16th — human-to-human heart transplant surgery. In all the glory, the hospital didn’t mention that the heart was taken from Bruce Tucker without his or his family’s consent — though William Tucker told the Richmond TimesDispatch at the time. Neither did the hospital mention that, as the paper learned, Tucker was an African
American laborer whose death
prolonged the life of a white businessman. That it all took place in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy and a city still shaded by race and segregation, only contributed to the case’s intrigue.
Author Chip Jones learned of the story while working as director of communications and marketing at the Richmond Academy of Medicine from 2010 to 2018. He had been an investigative reporter and editor for nearly 30 years, including his last stretch at the TimesDispatch.
At the academy, he learned about Dr. David Hume, who was hired by MCV in 1956 to modernize its surgery program. Hume worked closely with Dr. Richard Lower, whose advancements in heart surgeries on animals in the 1950s carved the path for similar success in humans. Both were at MCV in the early 1960s during the international race to successfully transfer a human heart to another, a contest that rivaled the one to put a man on the moon. It was no wonder that doctors like South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard asked to study under Hume and Lower in 1966. That following year, however, Barnard clinched worldwide acclaim when he completed the first heart transplant in December 1967.
“I remembered his name from my high school days in the 1960s,” Jones said of Barnard. “He was a superstar; he was on a level like Anthony Fauci meets Bill Gates.”
Richmond’s surgeons kept pushing and performed its surgery six months after Barnard’s.
Jones couldn’t help but want to know more. But as he read more, he wondered why the name of the person who donated the heart, who made the history happen, was barely mentioned in the medical literature. Once he knew why, Jones knew he had a book.
“I put air quotes around the word ‘ donor,’ ” Jones said, “when I realized a great wrong had been done to this man.”
Jones’ research shows that what happened to Bruce Tucker was just one more tradition the colonists brought with them to the “New World.”
Grave robbing was a money-making venture in England. Men scavenged cemeteries under the cloak of night to sell corpses to medical schools. Schools also sent out their janitors and sometimes students to hunt for dissection material.
Before the Medical College of Virginia opened in the 1830s, grave robbing was a well-known secret that allowed schools to boast about their “handson” training. The graveyards of the formerly enslaved and freed Blacks, with little political or legal protections, were easy targets.
According to Jones, MCV’s location was selected, in part, because Richmond thrived as the country’s second-largest slave market, coming behind New Orleans. Dr. Augustus Warner, who led the drive for a Richmond school, once bragged that the high numbers of enslaved who were worked to death on farms or factories would provide an abundance of dissection material that “we believe are not surpassed if equaled by any city in our country. The number of negroes employed in our factories will furnish materials for the support of an extensive hospital, and afford to the student that great desideratum — clinical instruction.”
By the 1960s, a common and macabre joke in Black neighborhoods surrounding the school was that if you went walking at night you might not be seen again.
That warm Friday evening in 1968, Bruce Tucker had finished his shift at an egg-processing plant, where he had worked for nearly 30 years. He and some friends marked the end of the week by swigging on a bottle of wine behind an Esso gas station. Tucker was sitting on a wall, lost his balance, fell and hit his head. He was rushed by ambulance to MCV, a few blocks away.
Also in the hospital was 54-year-old Joseph Klett, a businessman from Orange, who was losing a fight with a diseased heart. Klett had been transferred to Richmond after being hospitalized in Charlottesville. His prognosis wasn’t good and neither was Tucker’s.
Around mi d n i g h t , Tucker was rushed into emergency surgery to help him breathe and to relieve bleeding around his brain. Jones’ book contends that doctors were not discussing his chances for survival. They were wondering if he could be a transplant candidate for Klett, who was in a bed a floor above.
Jones interviewed doctors who were at the hospital that night who said that staff had already discounted Tucker as a “charity patient.” He had entered the hospital with alcohol on his breath, and it was assumed he wouldn’t pay his bill.
The idea fits into a broader discussion about how racism permeates the medical system and has created a distrust among some African Americans toward medicine, a historical trauma, Jones said. A June Pew Research Center study showed that African Americans more than any other ethnic or racial group are more reluctant to trust medical scientists, the use of experimental medical treatments or sign up for potential vaccines to combat illness.
Jones said he can’t say for certain that had Tucker been a poor white man, he would have been offered better care.
“It is just my sense that if it was a white guy coming into the Medical College of Virginia, at that date and time, that he would have gotten treated differently.”
By 2 p.m. that Saturday, Tucker was gasping for breath and neurological tests showed “no evidence of cerebral activity.” Doctors concluded he was brain-dead and alive only because of a machine breathing for him. An 1884 state law required a 24hour waiting period from the time a person was declared dead to when the body could be used for research. But doctors in 1968 dismissed the rule as archaic; they did not have time.
The hospital had already contacted the Richmond police to see if anyone had called about Tucker or filed a missing person’s report. No one had, but no one knew he was missing. Police went to the boarding house address given by the ambulance crew. But Tucker lived alone and no one answered knocks on his door. One of the few items in Tucker’s trouser pockets was a card to his brother’s shoe repair business, where William Tucker was busy that Saturday.
But neither the police nor the hospital used the card to call him. The only pertinent call Tucker received was that mysterious call about his brother around 2:30 p.m.
Meanwhile, Dr. Richard Lower was prepping Klett for surgery while another doctor switched off Bruce Tucker’s ventilator at 3:30 p.m. While Klett received the heart, one kidney went to a woman who was a patient at Georgetown University Hospital. The other kidney was for research at MCV, under the direction of Hume.
When William Tucker got to the hospital around 7 p.m, he was told that his brother was dead. His body was released that Sunday to a funeral home not far from where the Tuckers grew up in Dinwiddie County. The book describes how Tucker was too stunned to ask questions.
Klett died seven days later, his body rejecting the heart.
In the intervening time, William Tucker called a young African American attorney who’d grown up in Richmond hearing the scary stories about the hospital. His name? Lawrence Douglas Wilder, who in 1989 was elected governor of Virginia. But in 1968, he was known as a brash but effective trial attorney.
He told Tucker he would take the case.
Jones i n t e r v i e we d Wilder for his book, one of the few times he’s discussed it, Jones said. He quotes Wilder saying it still lives with him.
Wilder said in his 2015 memoir, “Son of Virginia: A Life in America’s Political Arena,” that Tucker vs. Lower was one of the most important cases of his career.
The case went to court in May 1972 and attorneys sparred over questions such as does life end when the heart stops beating or when the brain ceases to function? What if the heart continues to pump when the brain has stopped? Could they have left Bruce Tucker brain-dead, but still on a machine, until his family could have been located? Most important, was Bruce Tucker dead when doctors removed his heart?
Almost four years to the day of Bruce Tucker’s fall, the jury said yes.
Jones found and included in his book one juror who believed the family should at least have been compensated for their loss. But the judge had ruled earlier that the statute of limitations for emotional distress had expired.
The Tuckers were devastated.
Hume and Lower continued with their transplant work. The Hume-Lee Transplant Center at VCU Health, the former MCV, celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2017.
Last month, the MCV Foundation, a philanthropic body that supports VCU Health, added an editor’s note atop a 2017 story that marked the 50th anniversary of the world’s first heart-transplant surgery.
“The foundation acknowledges with regret the controversy surrounding the lack of consent from Bruce Tucker’s next of kin before his heart was used in the first heart transplant performed at MCV,” it reads. “The reality of this incident complicates the legacy of a medical breakthrough and underscores a collective and ongoing imperative for all of us at VCU Health on the MCV Campus to listen to and accept criticism and to learn from our past as we work to honoring the dignity of all whom we serve,” the note said, with a typographical error.
Jones agrees there is room to learn and grow from this history. He said there are petitions circulating now to include more teaching in medical schools about systemic racism in medicine.
“My hope is that my book can serve as a window into the past to really help see the present,” Jones said. “People who are older who might read this and think, ‘Well, what’s the point of pointing the finger at all these problems?’
“Well, it’s not too late to change. We need to hear these things.”