For six decades, ‘the man with the golden arm’ donated blood — and saved 2.4 million babies
In 1951, a 14-year-old Australian boy named James Harrison awoke from a major chest operation. Doctors had removed one of his lungs in a procedure that had taken several hours — and would keep him hospitalized for three months.
But Harrison was alive, thanks in large part to a vast quantity of transfused blood he had received, his father explained.
“He said that I had 13 units of blood and my life had been saved by unknown people,” Harrison told CNN’s Sanjay Gupta decades later.