Heart of the Matter
In 1921, Werner Forssmann was a German urologist who pioneered the technique of cardiac catheterization—the insertion of a catheter into the heart to measure the pressure inside to help determine if a patient needs surgery. Inspired by the work of scientists who had catheterized a horse in 1861, Forssmann wanted to test catheterization in humans but could not get permission for such a dangerous-sounding experiment. Deciding to take a different tack, he asked an operating room nurse to set up the necessary equipment and assist him. She agreed, but only on the noble condition that he perform the procedure on her rather than trying to experiment on himself. No sooner was the nurse prepped on the table than Forssmann anesthetized his own arm and made a cut, inserting the catheter twelve inches (or thirty centimeters) into his vein. He then calmly climbed two flights of stairs to the x-ray suite before threading it the rest of the way into his heart and getting an x-ray to check the placement. He was later forced to resign from that hospital, then hired back, then fired again.
Great Balls of Science
In the early ‘30s, Doctors Herbert Woollard and Edward Carmichael observed that patients sometimes experienced pain in unrelated parts of their body when an internal organ was damaged. To learn more about that phenomenon, they decided to deliberately damage one of their own organs. But what organs were both noncritical and easily damaged? Perhaps an organ, or a pair of organs, that were outside the body. Yes, they chose to experiment with their gentlemen’s bits to study pain. In their notes, Woollard and Carmichael recorded that “the testis was drawn forward” and placed under a pan, though they did not note whose testis nor who did the drawing forward. They then added weights to the pan and recorded the resulting sensations. The pair performed the experiment multiple times, eventually concluding that testicular pain often came with generalized torso pain. If only one testicle was harmed, only one side of the torso would feel its effects. Was their bravery worth it? Doctors still note the “referred pain” that comes along with testicular trauma, so they helped advance medical knowledge in their own way.
After chemist Albert Hoffman first synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in 1941, he famously rode his bicycle home while under the influence of the drug. The date, April 19, became a pseudo-holiday in recreational pharmaceutical circles, called Bicycle Day.
Skin Deep
What would it take for you to willingly let parasitic hookworms burrow through your skin, live in your intestines, and feed off your blood? That’s precisely what immunologist and biologist David Pritchard did in 2004. Auto-immune diseases like asthma and Crohn’s disease are relatively uncommon in areas where hookworms are prevalent. Pritchard had a hypothesis that hookworm infections reduce allergy and asthma symptoms by modifying the body’s immune response, but he needed human subjects to test. In order to appease his ethics committee, he agreed to be the guinea pig, along with volunteers from his team. “They itch quite a bit when they go through the skin,” said Pritchard, but they became truly troublesome when they reached his stomach, causing pain and diarrhea. Fifty hookworms turned out to be too many; ten hookworms was a better number. The experiment later allowed for wider testing on humans, who reported miraculous relief of allergy symptoms. As of the date of publication, clinical trials are underway to evaluate hookworms as a treatment for various conditions, including multiple sclerosis.
Slapstick for Science
In 1898, German surgeon August Bier figured out that a dose of cocaine injected into the spinal fluid could serve as an effective anesthesia. In order to prove it this, he had his assistant, Augustus Hildebrandt, attempt to inject him, but Hildebrandt messed it up and Bier ended up leaking spinal fluid from a hole is his neck. Rather than abandon the experiment, the two men traded places. The injection went correctly this time. Bier proceeded to hit, stab, hammer, and even burn his assistant. He also pulled Hildebrandt’s pubic hair and squashed his testicles. Both men suffered terribly for days after the cocaine wore off and they were able to feel pain again. While Bier took time off work to recover, Hildebrandt had to fill in for Bier. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hildebrandt subsequently fell out with Bier, becoming one of his fiercest critics.
Sick Burn, Bro
In front of a full house at the Royal Institution in the United Kingdom in June 1903, physicist Pierre Curie, husband of two-time Nobel Prize winner Marie, displayed a burn on his arm caused by radium salts, which he had taped to his arm for ten hours more than fifty days prior. During the demonstration, Curie dropped some radium on the desk. The resulting contamination was still detectable half a century later. The Curies hoped that radium’s burning effect might prove useful in the treatment of cancer. Ironically, the radiation from that the sample, as well as other chemicals the Curies routinely exposed themselves to, had a catastrophic effect on their health. Both Pierre and Marie persevered though constant sickness, fatigue, and pain to continue their experiments, which set the course for the use of radium in medicine.
The Ffirth and Hopefully Last
A special place in science heaven must be reserved for Stubbins Ffirth, who, as a medical student in the early nineteenth century, conducted a series of potentially lifesaving but definitely stomach-turning experiments to prove that yellow fever was not contagious. Yellow fever is a viral disease that causes fever, chills, loss of appetite, nausea, muscle pains, and headaches, and can be fatal. At the time, doctors believed yellow fever passed from person to person, like the flu, but Ffirth disagreed. He began by taking “fresh black vomit” from a yellow fever patient and pouring it onto cuts in his arm. He did not come down with yellow fever. Emboldened, Ffirth collected a patient’s vomit and put it in his eyes. He smeared himself with all manner of bodily fluids, including blood, saliva, sweat, and urine. He sat in a “vomit sauna,” an enclosed space full of heated vomit fumes, which caused him “great pain in [his] head,” but did not otherwise affect his health. Finally, he took to eating the vomit, first in pill form, then straight from a patient’s mouth. Satisfied with his thoroughness, Ffirth published his 1804 book A Treatise on Malignant Fever; with an Attempt to Prove Its Non-Contagious Nature, in which he declared categorically that yellow fever not contagious. Yellow fever is in fact contagious, but only through blood transmission via mosquito bite. This was proven by another self-experimenter, US Army surgeon Jesse Lazear, a century later, when he allowed himself to be bitten by mosquitoes carrying yellow fever. Lazear would ultimately die of a mosquito-borne disease, not from one of the mosquitoes he bred for his experiments, but from a wild mosquito who happened by.
These ladies are the worst.
Giving Me Agita
Just as Ffirth swam against the tide of yellow fever contagion, Dr. Barry Marshall was sure the medical establishment had the wrong idea about stomach ulcers. The accepted wisdom was that stomach ulcers were the result of stress and other lifestyle factors, but Marshall was sure the culprit was the Helicobacter pylori bacterium. To prove his hypothesis, Marshall and pathologist Robin Warren needed to examine the bacteria in a human body, but as Marshall explained to New Scientist in a 2006 interview, “I was the only person informed enough to consent.” Marshall did not tell his hospital’s ethics committee what he planned until after he had swallowed the bacteria. He did not even tell his wife. The first three days were unremarkable, then Marshall began vomiting; his wife complained that he had “putrid breath.” A biopsy at the two-week mark confirmed that he had gastritis, which can lead to ulcers. While it took some years for Marshall and Warren’s theory to gain traction, they were awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
Australia: Satan’s Aquarium
A jellyfish was to Queensland doctor Jack Barnes what Helicobacter pylori was to Marshall. A strange illness, now called Irukandji syndrome, had appeared in Australia in the mid-twentieth century, characterized by severe muscle aches, nausea, and blinding pain. It also had a truly bizarre symptom—patients would experience levels of anxiety so severe that some asked their doctors to kill them. The cause was unknown, but it