Forrest General Hospital's First Organ Donation

The hallways and spaces outside the Intensive Care Unit and Emergency Department (ED) at Forrest General Hospital were packed with teenagers.

They leaned against the walls, sat on the floor, and crowded around the elevator that carried patients up to ICU from the ED. There were so many of them that hospital security eventually asked the group to move to do a different area, so ambulances could reach the entrance.

They were there for Jamie.

James “Jamie” Talmage Breakfield was only 16, a Columbia High School student who had been critically injured in a car accident on July 27, 1974. For two days, family and friends waited anxiously at the hospital, hoping for good news.

But on July 29, Jamie died from traumatic brain injuries.

In the middle of that loss, his parents were asked a question few families faced at the time — whether they would consider donating their son’s organs so they might help someone else live.

In 1974, organ donation was still a relatively new concept.

Although the 1968 Uniform Anatomical Gift Act made organ donation legal, transplant medicine was still developing. Kidney transplants were the most common procedures, while heart and liver transplants had only recently begun in the late 1960s.

There was no national organ-matching system yet, meaning many potential donations could not be used because physicians could not quickly locate compatible recipients.

In Mississippi, transplant surgeries were primarily performed at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, which had established its kidney transplant program in November 1962.

Just one month before Jamie’s accident, the Mississippi Legislature passed a new organ donor law allowing residents to designate themselves as organ donors on their driver’s licenses by placing a fluorescent “DO” sticker on the front of the license. The program was promoted through the Kidney Foundation of Mississippi and the Mississippi Highway Safety Division.

Even with the new law, organ donation was not widely discussed. The first successful kidney transplant in the United States occurred in 1954.

“There wasn’t a big push for organ donation then,” said Jamie’s aunt, Bobbie Breakfield Barber, who was also an FGH nurse.

The decision

Barber still remembers the moment hospital staff told her sister, Elizabeth Breakfield, and her husband, Talmage, that a physician wanted to speak with them.

The doctor was Dr. Philip W. Rogers, a kidney specialist who had only recently joined the Forrest General medical staff. The July 1974 edition of the hospital’s internal newsletter The GeneralScope noted Rogers’ arrival in the practice of nephrology.

“Elizabeth, also an FGH nurse, looked at Talmage and said, ‘He’s not going to live,’” Barber recalled. “Why, when they are so worried about his brain, would they want to talk to us about his kidneys?”

Dr. Rogers asked whether the family would consider donating Jamie’s kidneys.

After a moment, they said yes.

“If he had been able, Jamie would have said ‘yes’ in a heartbeat. At the time, I didn’t even know people put it on their driver’s license,” Barber said, unaware of the bill that had passed one month previously.

A quiet first

Barber remembers the surgery to recover Jamie’s kidneys was performed at Forrest General Hospital by Dr. Lewis E. Hatten, MD, FACS, RPVI, a general surgeon who had joined the hospital’s medical staff earlier that month.

Barber said the family was told at the time that Jamie may have been the first person to donate kidneys at Forrest General.

“Dr. Hatten told Elizabeth and Talmage that Jamie was the first person to ever donate kidneys here,” Barber said. “Looking back, kidneys were being donated before hearts, so I wonder if he may have been the hospital’s first organ donor.”

Jamie’s kidneys were transported to University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, where they were transplanted into two young recipients.

In recent years, while cleaning out the Breakfield family home, the family discovered a letter from the hospital.

“All it said was that two young people in the Jackson area received the organs without any issue and were doing well,” Barber said. “It didn’t say anything more than that.”

Hatten, who retired in 2004 after a successful career at Forrest Health, is now a member of the Forrest Health Board of Trustees, so this is truly a full circle moment for him.

The boy behind the story

Jamie was between his junior and senior years at Columbia High School. He wasn’t known as a big sports player, Barber said, but he loved being outside and spending time with friends.

“He was one of the sweetest, most humble kids you’d ever want to meet,” Barber said. “Everybody loved him, and he never spoke an ill word about anybody.”

Jamie was especially close to his younger brother, Teddy. The two shared a bedroom and spent much of their time together.

His younger sister, Tammy, was just 12 years old when he died. Because of the severity of Jamie’s injuries, only his parents were able to see him after the accident.

“Tammy told me later she always told herself he was on a secret mission,” Barber said.

Jamie was known for the small, ordinary moments he shared with family.

One memory still makes Barber smile.

“He called my mother one day and said, ‘Mammaw, I’m out of school. Would you make some tomato gravy and biscuits?’” she said. “She did, and he came over.”

In the years after Jamie’s death, members of the Breakfield family would develop their own connections to Forrest General Hospital. Barber worked in the hospital’s pediatric department for more than 27 years. Jamie’s mother, Elizabeth, later worked for a time as a nurse on the orthopedic floor, and Teddy’s wife, Kim, spent 36 years working in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit before retiring earlier this year.

In an unexpected way, the hospital that once held so many painful memories also became a place where the family spent decades caring for others.

A legacy that continues

When Jamie died in 1974, Mississippi did not yet have an organ procurement organization. Donations across the state were coordinated through the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

The Mississippi Organ Recovery Agency — now known as MORA — was not established until 1992. Today, the nonprofit organization works with hospitals across the state to coordinate organ and tissue donation and help families give the gift of life.

More than five decades after Jamie’s death, his family hopes his story will become part of that legacy. They are working to get his name added to the Wall of Heroes at Forrest General Hospital. The wall, located in the main hallway, honors past organ donors at the hospital with a photo and brief writeup about each donor. Forrest General’s Wall of Heroes will soon be able to be viewed on the MORA website.

The grief of that summer never fully faded for the Breakfield family. But neither did the quiet good that came from it — a decision made in love that gave two other young people the chance to grow up, grow old and live the life Jamie never had the chance to finish.