A Brother's Sacrifice

Tommy Strunk, a 28-year-old Kentucky railroad worker, was slowly dying of a kidney disease. According to doctors, the only therapy that could save him was a kidney transplant, and the best donor would be Tommy's brother Jerry, 27. But Jerry, though he idolizes Tommy, is confined to a state mental hospital. Even if he had fully understood the crisis, Jerry was mentally incompetent to authorize surgery on himself.

When the boys' mother asked a court to authorize the transplant operation, the guardian appointed by the state to represent Jerry in the case objected. The state, he argued, had no power to approve the removal of an organ from a mental incompetent. Even so, the court approved the surgery on the ground that Jerry's well-being "would be jeopardized more severely by the loss of his brother than the removal of a kidney."

The Kentucky Court of Appeals has just upheld that Solomonic decision, but not without severe debate. Speaking for three dissenters, Judge Samuel Steinfeld was troubled by his "indelible" recollection of Nazi Germany's "genocide and experimentation with human bodies." Steinfeld argued that the mother had not demonstrated conclusively that the operation would benefit the retarded brother. "The ability to fully understand and consent," he declared, "is a prerequisite to the donation of a part of the human body."

The majority cited a psychiatric report, pointing out that Jerry constantly asks about Tommy's visits and depends on him for "a real community of feeling and unity of understanding." If both

Tommy and his parents die, said the court, "Jerry will have no concerned, intimate communication so necessary to his stability and optimal functioning." Last week, as the Strunks recuperated from their surgery, which so far has been free of any medical complications, Jerry probably never felt more useful to his brother Tommy.

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