When Everett Knowles hitched a ride on a Boston train, he expected to make it home in a few minutes. But the result was the final leg of a medical history journey more than 30,000 years in the making when Eddy Knowles' doctors turned tragedy into a medical miracle.

Eddy's impromptu arm transplant humanity's first successful limb reattachment became one of the 20th century's great surgery stories. The path from accident to surgery required an almost impossible set of conditions to line up perfectly, and then it actually had to work. On the day of the accident, the wild scramble to harness expertise and to weigh calculated risks make for an engaging story of science and human ingenuity but the truth is that the same exact process of discovery and daring is what forged the centuries of scientific knowledge that Eddy's doctors used to save his arm.

Scientific triumphs and medical miracles happen every day. They just take thousands of generations to be born.

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