A Heart Stolen: A Genocidal Nazi-like Crime
In 1968, a Black man had his heart removed and placed into a white financial specialist without his or his family’s knowledge or consent at a medical school. We already know about the theft of blood cells containing cancer from Henrietta Lacks, but here is another story of medical crime. This is the shocking story of the first heart transplant operation in the segregated bigoted South. Bruce Tucker was the victim this time. His heart was illegally taken in 1968 many years and tears after the Henrietta Lacks incident in 1951. The Medical College of Virginia was the criminal institution in this case. The college had a long history of robbing graves using a man named Chris Baker who stole fresh corpses from cemeteries and was on the payroll for years. It would be at the segregated hospital, St. Philip’s Hospital, where Bruce Tucker’s family would learn his fate. Horribly, in 1994, there would be the discovery of other victims from before the Civil War as skeletons were discovered during reconstruction of the Medical College of Virginia.
Bruce Tucker was admitted to the Virginia hospital after a horrible fall for a head injury and was soon seen as a prize for stealing his heart. Instead of caring for him the hospital embarked on a scheme to steal his heart and transplant it into another human being. They were able to do this by pronouncing him dead, while he was still breathing, for the purpose of the organ theft. A criminal doctor by the name of Dr. Richard Lower led the term of surgeons to pronounce him dead for this theft. In all, almost two dozen medical staff were implicated in this crime and his brother filed a law suit. His brother was not given the paper work for consent to the heart removal, but these criminal doctors stole his heart anyway. Even after the law suit, the college refused compensation to the Tucker family.
In those days, in which there was little if any institutional review that could have prevented this, there was a saying that I heard as a young man in the Black community, which was often quoted as, “If you are Black you can go into a hospital with a cold and come out without a heart.” Doctors who were engaged in body snatching were called “night boogie men” for years as far back as the 1850s. Doctors were all trying to get credit for the first successful heart transplant and many were willing to commit crimes for that credit. Stealing bodies was practiced in England for many years as bodies were stolen from graves by body snatchers called “resurrection men.” These men would often pretended to be friends of the deceased and attend the burial, sometimes shedding fake tears, waiting until every one left and dig up the corpse and transport it to a medical school to be paid at the back door by medical staff. This practice was used by various medical schools in the United States before and after the Civil War.
Interestingly, the Black lawyer who filed the law suit on behalf of the victim Bruce Tucker, was Lawrence Douglass Wilder, who became the governor of Virginia in 1990. Years after this horrible event Wilder is still saddened by the fact that the case was dismissed by a racist judge. The college has since apologized, after for than 50 years for this, but too little, too late, as this Nazi-like crime cannot be forgotten and why Black History is needed in schools.
