Liberator in History: James Harrison

There are a lot of things we could use more of these days. More kindness comes to mind. More people willing to stop bad actors, and hurtful, unprovoked attacks against others. More stories about the good Samaritans who become heroes to people they'll never meet.

We can learn a lot from such stories, and James Harrison's story teaches us something many people never knew.

For more than 60 years, Harrison, an Australian man, kept showing up at a blood donation center. Every two weeks or so, he’d roll up his sleeve and give because he knew what it meant to need someone else's blood.

When James was 14, he underwent major surgery and received more than a dozen units of blood. While recovering, he decided that when he was old enough, he would become a blood donor himself.

At 18, he started and kept going until he was 81.

When James was 21, after a donation, doctors discovered that he had something extraordinarily rare in his blood plasma. It contained an antibody called Anti-D that could be used to make a medication protecting unborn babies from a potentially deadly problem involving the mother's blood.

Here's the simple version of what happens.

If a pregnant woman has Rh-negative blood, and her baby has Rh-positive blood, a small amount of the baby's blood can sometimes enter the mother's bloodstream. When that happens, her immune system is alerted and begins making antibodies against it.

Those antibodies can cause serious complications for the baby. Before Anti-D treatment became available, Rh disease was a major cause of stillbirth, newborn death, and serious illness.

Thanks to James, Anti-D injections changed that. It has become a standard way of protecting babies from this particular threat. The treatment is used in the United States and many other countries, as well as Australia.

Over more than six decades, James donated plasma and blood 1,173 times. His donations contributed to about 2.4 million doses of Anti-D for Australian babies alone. Ironically, his own daughter, Tracey, was one of those babies who received Anti-D treatment.

James died in 2025 at the age of 88. For decades, he cheerfully made an ongoing contribution to the world to prevent death in countless people he would never meet.

At a time when there's plenty in the world that can sour our outlook or make us lose faith, James Harrison’s life reminds us that liberating others needn't always fall on the shoulders of a soldier, general, or president. No parades, no medals, no glory. Liberating someone may come from the simplest action and bring you just a heartfelt thank you, along with the knowledge that you made the world a happier place for even just one person.