The Organ Thieves Quotes

“Is the death of a person a matter of medical judgment, left to the physician to determine, or is it a legal question?” It was, in its own way, an updated version of the nineteenth-century controversies over body snatching,”
― Chip Jones, The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South

“The controversy over Bruce Tucker’s bodily remains reverberated in American popular culture and remained focused on the expropriation of black bodies, rather than on the need for increased minority access to the benefits of American high-tech medicine.”
― Chip Jones, The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South

“Despite encountering the occasional swelled head, Jack Russell “could stand toe to toe with them,” observed John. “He respected their egos and they respected his.”
― Chip Jones, The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South

“sometimes bad things just happen that aren’t necessarily someone else’s fault.”
― Chip Jones, The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South

“We have seriously considered doing the procedure in humans,” Lower said, but “because of the fact that we considered it an extremely high risk and untried, unproven procedure in humans, I think we decided it would be reserved only for extreme circumstances in humans.”3 As he explained his thinking, Lower added that it “should be used only when death of a patient seemed imminent.” It should be used to save a life, he said, but not to create what he called “cardiac cripples.” Though his self-examination drew scant notice at the time, it showed the surgeon’s awareness of the inherent risks that came with bringing heart patients back from the edge of the abyss.”
― Chip Jones, The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South

“Christiaan Barnard, for all his well-documented flaws, would later agree with the Americans. “You have to recognize that in South Africa we didn’t have the legal restraints of other countries,” he confided to British medical writer John Illman. “I didn’t even have to ask permission to do that first transplant. I just told the hospital authorities after I had done it. Can you imagine that happening anywhere else in the world?”39”
― Chip Jones, The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South

“Philip Morris always managed to make billions of dollars in profits. It did so by adapting to the changes in the political, legal, and cultural climate. The same couldn’t be said, however, of the nearby public hospital that treated thousands of Virginians each year for heart disease, lung cancer, and emphysema. This was especially true of MCV’s years of hand-wringing about finally stamping out its racist practices.”
― Chip Jones, The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South

“It took years before journalists exposed these government-backed operations. The psychedelic spy craft would join other instances in American medicine where human rights were trampled in the name of progress. In the 1950s and 1960s, doctors and academic medical centers enjoyed so much prestige and authority that they often operated virtually unchecked from outside supervision. The notion of “informed consent” was nonexistent.”
― Chip Jones, The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South

“Their outrage was understandable considering the continuing desecration and plundering of African American burial grounds at a time when lynchings—meant to enforce white supremacy and intimidate blacks through terrorism—often went unpunished throughout the South.”
― Chip Jones, The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South

“This authorized history of MCV provides, in its own a way, a useful account of the blindness about the system that frightened generations of black children in Richmond—including its future governor L. Douglas Wilder.”
― Chip Jones, The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South

“It has been claimed by many white men that Negroes are physically dissimilar to Caucasians. If that be true, then it is not fair to the white people that only colored ones should be dissected, and should be the only ones of whose physical structures the doctors have any knowledge.”
― Chip Jones, The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South

“In December 1882, “Old Chris” Baker had his cover blown. He was arrested, along with several white medical students, for attempted grave robbery at two African American cemeteries—Oakwood and Sycamore. The arrests were cheered by the Virginia Star, a black-owned publication with Republican ties. The news account focused more on the role of Baker as a traitor to his people than to the mendacity of the white MCV students.”
― Chip Jones, The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South

“The supply of material for Practical Anatomy is ample and at a very trifling cost.”
― Chip Jones, The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South

“Even as doctors acquired new cachet in the upper strata of society, the education of the American MD became inextricably bound to a system that would one day be seen as inhumane, unjust, immoral, and—more often than not—driven by deep-seated racial prejudice. So why did men who took the ancient Greek Hippocratic oath “to abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous” persist in inflicting such pain and emotional suffering upon vast swaths of the population?20”
― Chip Jones, The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South