The filmed death of George Floyd sparked global outrage. In time, more of the Police impunity in America was unearthed. The slogan, ‘I can’t Breathe’, was owned by all that felt the oppression of the white race. However, the Police is not the only institution through which racism has thrived in America.
The medical industry has, for years, systematically targeted black Americans for organ theft. Below is a press release from the seasoned journalist, Chip Jones. The Pulitzer Prize nominee is set to publish a book in August this year, titled ‘The Organ Thieves‘. The title uncovers the mud beneath the seemingly perfect medical industry of a global superpower. More on that later; but first:
Racism And Distrust In The Country’s Medical System Among African Americans
New York, NY, July 13, 2020̶ It’s no secret that the nation has seen a disproportionate loss of life among black Americans. That was the case in May 1968, when Bruce Tucker, a black factory worker, suffered a skull fracture and was rushed to the Medical College of Virginia (MCV). In less than 24 hours, the MCV surgeons had transplanted Tucker’s heart into the chest of a white businessman, prompting America’s first civil lawsuit for the wrongful death of its kind as explored inThe Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South(Gallery/Jeter Publishing), by Pulitzer Prize nominee and investigative journalist Chip Jones.
For the first time,The Organ Thievesshows how racially biased attitudes fit a broader pattern of discriminatory behavior toward black patients in the 1960s. Jones uncovers never-before-heard details and new investigative reporting including:
- Thenon-consensual surgical extraction of Bruce Tucker’s heart by surgeons at the Medical College of Virginia. After a junior medical examiner okayed the operation, Tucker’s beating heart was transplanted into the chest of an ailing white business-man without any prior consent by Mr. Tucker’s family.
- Original archival legal and court documents, buttressed by eyewitness interviews with physicians, lawyers and journalists—many of whom will be available for an interview for the book—who provide a tense, minute-by-minute account of the last hours of Bruce Tucker.
- Medical professional betrayals that mounted after the MCV doctors and adminis- trators were shocked and dismayed to lose the heart transplant race to a previously obscure South African doctor, Christiaan Barnard, on December 3, 1967.
- The first interview about the case in nearly half a century with L. Douglas Wilder, who was the Tucker family’s attorney in the case, and who would go on to become the first elected black governor in the United States.
- How Tucker’s brother William, a local storeowner and cobbler, was frantically calling the hospitalafter getting a tip from an insider that surgeons were planning something strange for Bruce, who was unconscious at the time.
- An in-depth exploration of the tradition of body-snatchingthat required surgical residents to work with professional grave robbers, a/k/a “resurrectionists.” These practices lingered in the former capital of the Confederacy throughout Reconstruction and near the dawn of the 20th century. The book reveals the strange life of MCV’s live-in body snatcher, Chris Baker— a black man who was revered by white medical students even as he faced threats of violence by local black citizens.
7. A controversy surrounding MCV in 1994 when evidence of dumping bodies into old wells popped into public view during a construction project at what is now Virginia Commonwealth University’s medical center. After archeologists managed to exhume more than 50 human remains, the university ordered the site shut down—leaving an untold number of other remains beneath the front entrance of the building.
Author Profile
- Joel Kenneth Ndawula is a Christian, and a Lawyer currently undertaking his LL.M at Uganda Christian University. As an avid reader and writer, he offers incisive legal commentary on current affairs. He can also be reached via email: [email protected]
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