The gift of life is never meant to be returned, especially not wrapped in plastic, packed in ice and enclosed in a small Igloo cooler. But that is precisely the transaction that occurred last week at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan, where doctors took the heart of a 22-year-old who died following a car crash and sewed it inside the body of her father.
Chester Szuber, a retired Christmas-tree-farm owner, had been tormented by heart disease for 20 years. He had endured three open-heart surgeries and two operations to clear his arteries. Four years ago, he was put on...