Jie-jie (also reported as Liu Junjie) was born on 1 April 2006 in Lu’an, Anhui province, with two left arms and one right arm. Both left limbs were unusually complete for a supernumerary arm — a form of polymelia so rare that Dr Chen Bochang of Shanghai Children’s Medical Center said he could find almost no comparable cases in the literature. Neither left arm worked normally. The inner arm lay bent across the chest, its hand clenched. The outer arm sat higher on the shoulder; it had no proper palm and could flex both ways. The infant also had a single kidney and a risk of spinal curvature. His parents, farmers, brought him to Shanghai because the local hospital could not operate.

On 6 June 2006, when the boy was about two months old, Chen’s team removed the inner, less developed arm in an operation of roughly two and a half to three hours. The technical difficulty was not drama for its own sake: the two scapulae were fused in a way a normal shoulder is not, imaging could not map the nerves in so small a patient, and the remaining arm had to be spared. In the event the nerves and vessels of the extra limb were arranged like those of an ordinary arm, and the dissection went more smoothly than expected. The hospital covered the cost — tens of thousands of yuan — that the family could not pay.

Success here meant survival and a two-armed outline, not a fully functional left hand. Chen said the remaining arm had good circulation but poor muscle and nerve development. Long physiotherapy would be required; full use was uncertain. A month later the BBC reported the child home and recovering, with Chen still arguing the amputation had been necessary. Extra limbs of this kind are often explained as the remnant of a twin that never finished forming. Jie-jie’s case was striking because both left arms were so nearly equal that choosing which to keep was itself a clinical problem.

The photographs that still circulate show a baby whose extra arm crossed his chest, then a bandaged chest in intensive care. The story is not a miracle of “absolute precision.” It is a documented paediatric orthopaedic decision: keep the limb more likely to grow, protect the shoulder, send the child to rehabilitation, and admit that the world had almost no precedent to follow.

Sources
The Guardian, 6 June 2006: “Operation removes baby’s third arm.”
CNN / Reuters, 6 June 2006; UPI; China Daily, 6–7 June 2006.
BBC News, 6 July 2006: “Three-armed boy ‘recovering well.’”