Medicine: Blood from the Dead

The 41-year-old woman in Pontiac General Hospital was anemic and needed blood transfusions to build her up for an operation. From the refrigerator, doctors took a pint of matching (Group A, Rh-positive) blood that had been stored for 19 days and transfused it into one of her veins. By the next day her blood counts were somewhat better, but to be on the safe side, the doctors gave her the concentrated cells from another pint of blood from the same donor.

What made this otherwise routine case remarkable was that the donor was a dead boy of twelve, who had drowned in...

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