Jones, Chip: The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South. New York: Gallery Books, 2020.

Jones, a veteran local journalist, relies on extensive interviews, court records, and news articles to reconstruct the first heart transplant in the south by Richard Lower, a pioneering surgeon.  But rather than sketch a tale of medical victory, he poignantly probes the racial implications of taking the heart from a poor African American man, BruceTucker, without the permission of his family, and the legal drama that ensued when future governor Douglass Wilder sued the Lower and the Medical College of Virginia, which had a predictably deplorable record of treating African Americans in richmond.  At stake was not only racial justice but also the legal concept of brain death, with potentially profound impacts on the future of transplant surgery.

For more on transplant surgery, consider:

Hamilton, David.  A History of Organ Transplantation.  Pittsburgh:  University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012.

– soup to nuts intellectual history of the field, with abundant references to the relevant scientific literature

Lederer, Sue.  Flesh and Blood.  New York:  Oxford University Press, 2008.

– social and culture history of blood transfusions and skin transplants in the USA in the early 20th century. 

Schlich, Thomas.  The Origins of Organ Transplantation.  Rochester:  University of Rochester Press, 2010.

– explore the foundations of transplant surgery in the late 19th and 20th century when pioneers figured out the technical basis of the procedure but were stymied by what came to be known as rejection