The Scientists Who Ran the Experiment on Themselves
A beaker of bacteria, a glass of black vomit, a catheter walked down a flight of stairs, and a bodkin pressed behind a twenty-three-year-old's eye.
The subject and the scientist were the same person. A doctor in Perth drank a broth of stomach bacteria to win an argument. A Philadelphia student rubbed a stranger’s black vomit into cuts in his own arms. A surgical intern threaded a tube into his heart after his boss had told him not to. The lab animal, every time, kept the notebook.
Barry Marshall swallowed a culture of Helicobacter pylori one morning in 1984 and got the gastritis he had predicted. Stubbins Ffirth, around 1802, dripped black vomit into his eyes, inhaled the steam, and then drank a glass of it, trying to prove yellow fever was not contagious. Werner Forssmann pushed a urinary catheter from the crook of his elbow to his right atrium in 1929, then walked downstairs for the X-ray. Isaac Newton slid a bodkin between his eyeball and the bone of the socket in 1665 or 1666 and wrote down the colors. John Paul Stapp strapped himself to a rocket sled on December 10, 1954, reached 632 miles an hour, and stopped in 1.4 seconds. Santorio Santorio ate, worked, and slept in a chair hung from a steelyard scale in Padua for about thirty years, because he was taking in more than he could account for going out.
This page is the shelf those self-experiments share. Start here for Barry Marshall and Werner Forssmann, and for the longer record of investigators who kept the risk.
- The Doctor Who Rode a Rocket Sled at 632 MPH — and Gave Us Murphy's Law
- The Needle Isaac Newton Slid Behind His Own Eyeball to Find Out Where Color Comes From
- The Doctor Who Ate, Slept, and Worked on a Giant Scale for 30 Years
- The Doctor Who Drank a Beaker of Bacteria to Prove Ulcers Weren't Caused by Stress
- The Student Who Drank Vomit to Prove Yellow Fever Wasn't Contagious
- The Surgeon Who Threaded a Tube Into His Own Heart