By every standard medical and logical, Henry Jackson, lying unconscious in a New Jersey hospital on his 32nd birthday, was finished. Massive internal hemorrhaging had drained him of 90% of his blood. His level of hemoglobin--the vital, oxygen-carrying compound in his red cells--had plummeted from a normal reading of 13 to an ominous 1.7, a number that one of his doctors characterized as "incompatible with survival." A blood transfusion could save him, but his wife, torn between her husband's life and their beliefs as Jehovah's Witnesses--a religious community that prohibits transfusions because of biblical references to the sacredness of blood--had refused....
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