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This is the final installment in a three-part series on the physical properties of blood, and the spiritual truths those properties may illumine. In the article, which originally appeared in the March 18, 1983, issue of Christianity Today, Paul Brand reflects on the startling blood transfusion that inspired him to become a surgeon. Brand's provocative thoughts were gathered by writer Philip Yancey.

My entire career in medicine traces back to one dreary night at Connaught Hospital in East London. Until then I had stubbornly resisted all family pressures to enter medical school. Instead, I had entered the building trade, apprenticing as a carpenter, a mason, a painter, and a bricklayer.

My goal was to use these skills back in India. Evening classes in civil engineering had exposed me to the theories behind construction. One obstacle to my return to India remained: the mission required a one-year course in hygiene and tropical medicine at Livingstone College. I was assigned to a local hospital to do dressings in the wards and to learn basic principles of diagnosis and treatment.

It was during one evening of my stint at Connaught that my whole view of medicine—and of blood—permanently shifted. Hospital orderlies wheeled a beautiful young woman into my ward. She had lost much blood in an accident. It had drained from her skin, leaving her an unearthly pale color, and her oxygen-starved brain had shut down into an unconscious mode.

The hospital staff lurched into their controlled-panic response to any patient near death. A nurse dashed down a corridor for a blood transfusion bottle while a doctor fumbled with the apparatus to get the transfusion going. Another doctor, seeing my white coat, thrust a blood pressure cuff at me. Fortunately, I was trained to read pulse and blood pressure, but I could not detect the faintest flicker of a pulse on her cold, limp wrist.

She looked like a waxwork madonna or an alabaster saint in a cathedral. Her lips, too, were pallid, and as the doctor searched her chest with his stethoscope I noticed that even the nipple of her small breast was white. Only a few freckles stood out against her pallor. She did not seem to be breathing, having long before passed through the desperate phase of heaving breathing. I felt sure she was dead.

The nurse arrived with a bottle of blood, which she buckled into a high metal stand as the doctor punctured the woman's vein with a large needle. They had mounted the bottle high and were using an extra-long tube so that the increase in pressure would push the blood into her body faster. The staff told me to keep watch over the emptying bottle while they scurried off for more blood.

Nothing in my memory can compare to the excitement of what happened text. Certainly the precise details of that scene remain vividly with me to this lay. As I nervously held her wrist while the others were gone, suddenly I could teel the faintest press of a pulse. Or was it my own pulse? I searched again—it was there, barely perceptible but regular, at least. The next bottle of blood arrived and was quickly connected. A spot of pink appeared on her cheek, and spread into a beautiful flush. Her lips darkened pink, then red, and her body quivered in a kind of sighing breath.

Then her eyelids fluttered lightly and at last parted. She squinted at first, as her pupils adjusted to the bright lights of the room, and at last she looked directly at me. To my enormous surprise, in a very short time she spoke, asking for water. That young woman entered my life for only an hour or so, but the experience left me utterly changed. I had seen a miracle: the creation of Eve when breath entered into and animated her body, the raising of Lazarus. If medicine, if blood could do this . . .

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July (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47