Organ theft narratives

Western Folklore, Winter 1997 by Veronique Campion-Vincent

Suspicions are prevalent among the families of those mostly young victims of accidents, aneurisms, etc. who lie brain-dead in emergency rooms and kept breathing only by the life-support systems. These people are frequently poor members of minorities (Joralemon 1995). Brutally bereaved by the condition of the victims, these people wonder whether the physicians have done all they could to save their loved ones, whose sudden and unexpected disappearances, mostly accidental, haunt them. Because transplant operations are very costly, some feel that social justice is ill served by spending so much on advanced medicine when basic services are not available to large segments of the population (Fox and Swazey 1992). Advanced surgical facilities that practice organ transplants are especially viewed with suspicion in very non-egalitarian countries where a large sector of the population lives in poverty. Intense opposition to organ transplants has arisen in many countries such as Argentina (Cordoba), in the Philippines (especially after the case of the "murderous surgeons" still to be discussed), and in South Africa, where a moratorium on transplant operations was enacted in 1995. In such countries, concern, fear, and suspicion dominate the perception of the modern medical establishment. This perception is based on the intense distrust people harbor toward such medical practices as fertility aid and transplants. Especially in the case of organ transplants, there is the deeply felt conviction held by non-specialists that the body and the person are one. No wonder that these people fear medical professionals, who seek to depersonalize the transplant experiences of donors and receivers. This malaise is expressed in documentary articles and books, as well as in worst-case fictional stories that circulate both at the popular level and among the literate elite. This fear and distrust is not entirely new. It is easy to find earlier parallels to these contemporary cases of hostility toward the medical profession in the 18th and 19th centuries when the new practice of anatomical necropsies and dissections spawned public revulsion toward such medical developments, and especially toward such unsavory attendant practices as graverobbing and body-snatching. Then as now, much of the public's perception was influenced by wild rumors and narratives. Indeed, in November of 1768 a frenzied riot erupted in Lyon against the newly established School of Surgery after the rumor spread that kidnapped children were being dissected alive within the institution's walls.

Both technical and cultural factors have hindered the practice of organ procurement from cadavers in many parts of the world. The technical obstacles such as few emergency medical centers for the treatment of road casualties and inadequate transportation networks exist in all poor countries, but these impediments pale in comparison to the cultural taboos that are especially prevalent in the countries of Asia and the Middle East. It is here where a very high value is assigned to the preservation of the bodies of the deceased in their entirety until funereal rites can achieve closure to the individual's existence. Although the effect of these cultural factors is never relayed by Western media, their presence is revealed by the failure of Asian and Middle-East countries to enforce, or often even to enact, laws to facilitate organ procurement from cadavers. Such laws are in pronounced evidence in all Western nations, rich or poor, and are especially prevalent in Latin America. In Anglo-American countries the organ procurements are based on explicit consent, whereas in Latin America on "presumed" consent.