Meharry Medical College students Emmanuel Kotey, center, and Teresa Belledent, right, watch as the liver and kidneys are removed from an organ donor on June 15, 2023, in Jackson, Tenn. They’re part of a novel pilot program to encourage more Black and other minority doctors-to-be to get involved in the transplant field, increasing the trust of patients of color.
“There are very few transplant surgeons who look like me,” said Dr. James Hildreth, president of Meharry Medical College, which teamed with Tennessee Donor Services for the project—one of several by historically Black colleges and universities to tackle transplant inequity. The night’s tougher lesson: Hours into the surgery the room falls quiet again. The donor had died of a brain hemorrhage but now Sellers has found undiagnosed cancer in his lungs. The kidneys and liver, already carefully placed on ice, can’t be used. Still, the corneas can be donated—and for the two students, the surgery offered a powerful teaching moment.Mistrust and the transplant gap
The Meharry students know mistrust of the medical system—a legacy of abuses such as the infamous Tuskegee experiment that left Black men untreated for syphilis—is a barrier both to organ donation and seeking care, such as transplants, that people may not be familiar with. Stacey Scotton of Cleveland, Tennessee, said a cook in Meharry’s cafeteria listed the reasons he’s heard “that it’s not a good idea to be an organ donor. And I’m able to now go in and comfort him and correct, you know, some of those disbeliefs.”Back at the Jackson, Tennessee, hospital, Kotey and Belledent are getting a very different anatomy lesson than medical students’ introductory lab with cadavers.