It was just announced today that 8-year old Zion Harvey became the world’s youngest recipient of a double hand transplant earlier this month. I found the story inspiring, but was not overly impressed with the science considering that we have read about a few dozen successful double hand transplant cases in recent years and I have covered numerous other medical miracle type developments in my once-a-month brief updates posts on this blog. Some medical miracles are no longer a big surprise to me, even though they probably should be.

Then I read that little Zion also has prosthetic legs. Apparently, he lost both his hands and feet at the age of 2 due to a sepsis infection. Then I read that he also had a kidney transplant from his mother at the age of 4 after two years of dialysis! This now makes this whole story an absolute miracle. After I saw the below videos on Zion, I had no choice but to immediately write a post about him, even though I never write two blog posts in one day.

A three-year update from 2014 on the world’s first double hand transplant recipient is quite encouraging.  An article on early stage prosthesis from the late 1800s was also published three days ago and is worth a read. Compare with prosthetics of today.

New update from August 26: