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

The author of The Organ Thieves, Chip Jones worked as a journalist for approximately 30 years in Richmond, Virginia, and was once the communications director at the Richmond Academy of Medicine, where he learned the story behind the book. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Kansas. Although Jones did not grow up in Virginia, he spent almost his entire adult life there. This is his fourth book; his previous works were about the US Marine Corps. Earlier in his career, he was a member of a team whose coverage of a coal strike was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The Organ Thieves won the Library of Virginia’s Literary Award for Nonfiction.

In The Organ Thieves, Jones describes Bruce Tucker’s experience at Richmond, Virginia’s MCV in the historical context of medical racism and insufficient legal oversight of medical practices. Relying on historical archives and secondary works, Jones reveals how the practice of grave robbery (particularly at African American cemeteries) continued for years despite public outrage and the passage of a law against it. Jones notes how even the design of MCV’s medical school helped keep its activities secret from the public and how ethics took a backseat to scientific experimentation and the race to perform the first human heart transplant in the 1950s and 1960s.