“Tiger Country”: Kidneys for Sale in London in the 1980s

Throughout the 1980s, the city of London played host to a “black market” in renal transplantation, one in which both donors and recipients were recruited abroad. The practice came to light in 1988 and culminated in the thirty-six-day hearing of two surgeons and a prominent nephrologist. These practices required an atmosphere of minimal oversight and regulatory opacity in order to function. This essay argues that precisely such an environment was created by the expansion of the United Kingdom’s for-profit healthcare sector beginning in 1979.