Organ Theft Legends (review)

Campion-Vincent’s self-proclaimed objective in Organ Theft Legends is to “make people understand how a collective belief is born and develops—more precisely, how and why there arose a conviction that the theft of organs (particularly children’s organs) is systematically carried out nowadays” (x). The breadth and depth of materials necessary to carry out such a study is extensive, and includes hundreds of texts ranging from newspaper articles to televised documentaries, academic books and articles to Resolutions of the European Parliament. The corpus of organ theft stories is divided into three basic types—the baby parts story, eye thieves, and kidney heists—and each is discussed thoroughly. Broken into four chapters, plus an introduction, conclusion, appendix, and a 2005 afterword to the English edition (the book was originally published in French in 1997), Organ Theft Legends proves one of the best-researched works on the topic and is a welcome resource for English-speaking scholars.

Chapter 1, “Narratives and the Legend,” is a strictly historical discussion of the origins of the baby parts story in 1987 Honduras, tracing the legend’s path then to Guatemala and Paraguay over the course of some two years and highlighting the worldwide attention these narratives immediately received. After apparently dying out in 1989, these legends reappear en masse in 1992, and Campion-Vincent details the sociopolitical situations that made possible their intercontinental acceptance. From Brazil to Peru, Germany to Italy, the popularity of these legends only increased, and began to include stories centered on adult victims as well as children. The chapter closes with a discussion of the acceptance (or nonacceptance) of the three types of narratives.

Chapter 2, “Facts and the Legend,” is the book’s longest chapter, and begins with an examination of the historical realities of corpse snatching, much of which centered on the medical profession’s constant need for bodies on which to perform anatomies. Such actions evoked fear in the nonmedical population, and these reactions are then compared with the fears that exist in the modern world, especially as they relate to recent arguments over the definition of “death,” and how such definitions have changed the nature of organ transplantations. The global trade in human organs and tissues is then examined, including the voluntary sale of organs by living people (especially in India), the legal use of organs from executed prisoners in China, and the illegal use of tissue from corpses in Europe. The thread returns then to mid-1990s Latin America to examine the connections between real-life murders of homeless children, marginalized peoples, and political opponents, and the proliferation of stories involving children adopted by rich non-Latinos for organ harvesting purposes. The final section details the implausibility of organ thefts from a medical and technical perspective.

Chapter 3, “Exploitation of the Legend,” examines those who use organ theft narratives to forward their own causes and, in doing so, contribute to public familiarity with and belief in the legends. Campion-Vincent leaves no stone unturned here, and casts disparaging eyes toward “human rights organizations, militants, propagandists, politicians, moral authorities, and the so-called quality newspapers” (95) for their actions. Mass media reports in general are found specifically problematic in fomenting public concern, as they rarely detail positive stories, instead focusing on controversies and scandals, especially in filmed reports and documentaries. Four cases in particular are singled out, each having been claimed by a documentary as a “real” case of organ theft, and each case is discounted through academic investigation and commonsense logic. There follows a brief section on the folkloric origins of transplant narratives in wagers, jokes, and healing stories, and a final segment on the appearances of organ theft narratives in novels and films.

Chapter 4, “Analysis of the Legend,” summarizes the organ theft–related analyses of four sources: the United States Information Agency; Swedish journalist Jonny Sågänger, who spent several years investigating the topic; anthropologists; and folklorists. Roughly speaking, the first two sources spend most of their...