Content area
Full Text
Organ Theft Legends. By Véronique Campion-Vincent. Translated by Jacqueline Simpson. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. 236 + xii pp. $45.00 (hbk). ISBN 1-57806-593-3
Véronique Campion-Vincent first wrote about the topic of this book in a paper published in Western Folklore in 1990. At that time she believed that stories circulating in Latin America about babies being kidnapped so that their organs might be used in transplant surgery were ephemeral and had already run their course. As she explains in this book (p. xi), that judgement turned out to be false. Legends concerning organ theft have continued to flourish.
She distinguishes between three main types. One is pseudo-adoption, where children from poor communities are adopted by people from wealthier communities, supposedly to give them a better quality of fife, but actually so that their organs may be removed. So widespread is belief in this scenario that the Albanian authorities required foreigners adopting children to sign a declaration that they would not sell on their organs. (CampionVincent points out that this would hardly be an effective deterrent!) A second type of story concerns children being kidnapped and later found mutilated, frequently having lost their eyes. Belief in the reality of...