http://www.psmag.com/navigation/business-economics/nancy-scheper-hughes-black-market-trade-organ-detective-84351/The Organ Detective: A Career Spent Uncovering a Hidden Global Market in Human Flesh
BY ETHAN WATTERS
Tracking the organ trade, anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes visited African and South American dialysis units, organ banks, police morgues, and hospitals. She interviewed surgeons, patient’s rights activists, pathologists, nephrologists, and nurses. So why aren’t more people listening to her?
When she first heard about the organ thieves, the anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes was doing fieldwork in northeastern Brazil. It was 1987, and a rumor circulating around the shantytown of Alto do Cruzeiro, overlooking the town of Timbaúba, in a sugarcane farming region of Pernambuco, told of foreigners who traveled the dirt roads in yellow vans, looking for unattended children to snatch up and kill for their transplantable organs. Later, it was said, the children’s bodies would turn up in roadside ditches or in hospital dumpsters.
Scheper-Hughes, then an up-and-coming professor at the University of California-Berkeley, had good reason to be skeptical. As part of her study of poverty and motherhood in the shantytown, she had interviewed the area’s coffin makers and the government clerks who kept the death records. The rate of child mortality there was appalling, but surgically eviscerated bodies were nowhere to be found. “Bah, these are stories invented by the poor and illiterate,” the manager of the municipal cemetery told her.
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Topic: The Organ Detective: A Career Spent Uncovering a Hidden Global Market in Human F (Read 3339 times)