He was educated there and in Ohio prior to completing his medical training and taking up practice in Boston, Massachusetts; he specialized in urology at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Harrison taught surgery at nearby Harvard University, where he also contributed as a textbook editor and produced urological monologues.

[2] During World War II, he served in the United States Army Medical Corps in the Pacific Theater of Operations.

[2] After the war, Harrison also served at Harvard Medical School as Elliott Carr Cutler Professor of Surgery.

[2] Harrison, Joseph E. Murray, John P. Merrill, and others achieved the first successful kidney transplant, between identical twins Ronald and Richard Herrick, on December 23, 1954, at Brigham Hospital.

[6][2] According to Murray's Nobel lecture, the operation that Harrison performed on the donor represented the first time a patient was subjected to major surgery that was not for his own benefit.

Upon completion of the surgical procedures, the transplanted kidney immediately assumed normal function in the recipient; he survived for eight years and died in 1962, of complications from his original chronic nephritis.