Veronique Campion-Vincent is uniquely qualified to understand the dark world of organ theft, both real and metaphorical. Since 1987, she has dissected a gruesome corpus of contemporary folklore, narratives about body parts stolen from living victims, especially children. With nuanced sensitivity and a sense of justice, Campion-Vincent unflinchingly pursues these macabre, Hydra-headed stories around the globe, wherever versions of the tale circulate, among wealthy and poor, educated and illiterate, in urban universities and hospitals in Paris and New York or in Third World villages of Guatemala and Borneo.

There is no comparable research of such range and depth on this highly relevant topic. This valuable contribution to contemporary legend scholarship should attract folklorists, anthropologists, social and economic scientists, students of popular culture, biomedical ethicists, and others interested in the complex interactions between ancient emotions and scientific advances. The symbolic truths inherent in the organ theft legend can be seen as an artifact of the abyss dividing privilege and poverty today.

The Introduction tells how the author began her research, with the emergence of horrifying organ theft accounts in Latin America in 1985. Chapter 1 defines the legend as the popular conviction that organized criminals kidnap and/or kill, preferably the young, in order to provide human organs (eyes, kidneys, blood, tissue) to a vast network of unethical medical professionals who perform clandestine transplants, all for great profit. Three legend types, Baby Parts, Eye Thieves, and Kidney Heists, are described. The first two reached a crescendo in South America in the 1990s, with mobs attacking “gringos” suspected of kidnapping babies. One of the most interesting aspects of the Kidney Heist is its protean nature: in some versions impoverished villagers in India or Brazil are victims of the rich; in others naïve tourists are victimized by the poor in exotic locales or in sophisticated cities.

Chapter 2, “Fact and the Legend,” presents the crucial medical and social realities that inspire, fuel, and perpetuate such tales. Campion-Vincent traces the anxieties about bodily integrity of living and dead in medieval and modern Europe, discussing vampires, body snatchers for early medical researchers, and cannibalistic practices. Modern transplant surgeries save lives but raise a swarm of ethical issues, transgressing life and death boundaries and instrumentalizing and commercializing the body. Transplant procedures are misunderstood by the public, and the concept of consent is clouded with ambiguity. The author discusses the actual purchase of kidneys from the poor in India and related ethical questions, and presents numerous fascinating examples from modern Europe, North and South America, India, Japan, and China. This chapter also critiques various other interpretations of and responses to organ theft accusations by anthropologists, psychologists, and other scholars. Throughout, Campion-Vincent clearly distinguishes fact from imagination, and shows how suspicion and distrust of scientific authorities, as well as guilt by the privileged, are expected responses in today’s contexts of inequality and extraction of resources by powerful elites.

Chapter 3, “Exploitation of the Legend,” demonstrates how human rights organizations, NGOs, children’s and women’s protection groups, politicians, churches, medical institutions, elite news organizations, cable documentaries, and popular mass media help perpetuate the stories. This chapter also has interesting sections on folkloric antecedents, such as transplants with dire results in fairytales, saints’ legends, jokes, and in modern novels and films. Attempts to sort fact from fiction by government agencies, investigative journalists, and folklore scholars is covered in Chapter 4. Traditional beliefs about the magical powers of blood and of innocence are discussed, with diverse examples from around the world to reveal the emotional power of such themes. A wealth of significant, provocative information is presented in Chapters 1-4, but subheadings are often substituted for a more logical organization. The conclusion is excellent. Even when stories of organ theft are not factual, they serve important functions of social critique. Modern medicine’s amoral blurring of what once seemed immutable and rising inequalities and exploitation of the world’s poor, including the piecemeal appropriation of bodies, give these stories their resonance and plausibility and make them ring with metaphorical truth.

An Appendix describes three accusatory documentaries produced for cable TV in Europe and the US. Campion-Vincent’s bibliography is impressively diverse and international, and she delves into official responses to organ theft claims, as well as sensational news and entertainment media, oral lore, and lurid popular literature. Originally published in France in 1997, the deft translation in 2005 by folklorist Jacqueline Simpson makes Campion-Vincent’s unrivaled scholarship available in English. Since the book was written, the kinds of anxieties expressed in organ theft legends have become even more urgent, in reaction to morally unsettling biomedical innovations in the past decade. Consider the uproar occasioned by the world’s first face-transplant in France, the furor in the US over stem cell and human embryo research and the tensions evoked by the Terry Schiavo case, harvesting tissues and organs from anencephalic newborns, and other recent “brain-death” issues. Recent studies now show that organ recipients experience psychological trauma about the “gift” they receive, since even “voluntary” organ donations from the living or dead subvert the emotional meaning of “gift,” and since the gesture cannot be reciprocated. (Campion-Vincent alludes to this problem, 180-82.) The book is admirably up-to-date, citing sources up through 1997. There is an “Afterword to the American Edition, 2005,” citing some related events and sources up to 2004, but it does not appear in the Table of Contents and its location at the back of the book makes it likely to be overlooked.

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[Review length: 907 words • Review posted on December 5, 2006]