Blood Telepathy?

Ex-sergeant Frederick George Lee of the Middlesex Hospital, London, is not what you would call a sensitive man. Kind and sympathetic, yes; but army life and hanging around a hospital are scarcely calculated to give one a hair-trigger psyche. And yet, Frederick George Lee has doctors puzzled. They admitted it last week.

He is the Middlesex Hospital's official blood-supply man. Is it an old dodderer from whose veins the tingle of life has ebbed? A young slip of a girl, anaemic, wan, ghosty-eyed? Frederick George Lee bares his flesh, lets his stout heart pump good red blood into the sufferer's frame and for his office receives a goodly fee. In the past three years he has done that 24 times.

Here is where the puzzle comes in. Sometimes the patients live, sometimes not. Of Lee's beneficiaries 17 pulled through and 7 went to their rest. And in every single one of the latter cases, Frederick George Lee felt a severe pain in his arm at the precise moment of the patient's passing. He was depressed, distressed and overcome with illness, every time. Remarkable, because in no case did Lee behold the patient during the transfusion, in no case was he aware of the patient's condition until the last moment came, with its twinge for his arm. "Blood telepathy?" ask the doctors. "Do haemoglobin and leucocyte remember, do they call from the grave to their living brothers? Or is Frederick George Lee not so much spoofed about as spoofing?"