



Over the years dedicated clinicians and scholars have used their own bodies to advance science in ways that reshaped the world. In other instances what they did was just bad-ass. Here are a few examples of doctors who tried things on themselves:

Leonid Rogozov operated on his own appendix

This is perhaps the most gruesome of them all. Dr. Leonid Rogozov was a physician with the Russian delegation to Antarctica. He had the misfortune of suffering appendicitis while being there and for lack of any other way had to perform an appendectomy on himself. It took him an hour and 45 minutes. This was in 1961 and is well documented including a picture of Dr. Rogozov during the procedure.

He lived to be 66 and died in the year 2000. I think this story is remarkable for two reasons. The first, obviously is the feat itself. But the second, that most people tend to miss, is that he did it when he was only 27 years old and very inexperienced. For a more scientific account of events, you might want to read the case report in the British Journal of Medicine. By the way, others have performed self-appendectomies as well. The first is believed to be Dr. O’Neill Kane who did so in 1921 at the age of 60.









Heart catheterization – Truth and myth

Charles Dotter, the father of modern catheter based interventions and Andreas Gruentzig the father of coronary angioplasty are often cited as having performed the first procedures on themselves. But that is probably not true. The first documented peripheral catheterization to reach the right ventricle was performed by Werner Forssmann in 1929. And he did it on himself. After numbing his antecubital fossa and inserting a catheter he walked with it in his hospital to an X-ray machine to obtain images to show the tip in his heart. He lived to tell the tale and changed the way heart disease is treated forever. He also received a Nobel prize for his efforts in 1956. This prize, however, came somewhat too late as his work was not accepted immediately and he found himself working as a country doctor for much of his career.

Robin Warren infected himself with H. pylori

It may be hard to believe but not until long ago a peptic ulcer was a very bad disease to have. It resulted in much suffering and treatment options were limited. People actually died of perforated ulcers. Fast forward to 1983. Two Australian physicians, Robin Warren and Barry Marshall infected themselves with H. pylori and then proved both the creation of ulcers and their resolution with appropriate antibiotics. It is no surprise that they both won the Nobel prize for medicine in 2005 (here and here).

Penicillin was not discovered from Alexander Fleming’s snot

Talk about an ironic name, right? Well, Alexander Fleming did discover lysozyme that can be found in tears and nasal mucous after a drop fell on a petri dish. But the discovery of penicillin came out of a different mishap. A pile of petri dishes with S. aureus growing in them was too much for the lysol disinfectant that he had. This actually allowed for a mold to grow in one of the dishes and Dr. Fleming noticed that this mold did not allow bacteria to grow around it. Ten years later, penicillin was first manufactured. For his discoveries Alexander Fleming became ‘Sir’ Alexander Fleming and also won a Nobel prize for medicine. And of course, yes, he changed the world we live in.

The most awkward lecture

(Sir) Dr. Giles Brindley may have gone farther in some respects than all the others in this story. Dr. Brindley has used his own body in order to test his hypothesis that an erection can be manipulated by controlling blood flow to the penis. He went forward and injected his own penis with papaverine in a Urology conference to prove his point; papaverine could be used to treat erectile dysfunction. Aptly, the conference was held in Las Vegas that year. The crowd, as can be expected, reacted with total astonishment and left the lecture hall in a hurry. But Dr. Brindley has already done enough to etch his name in the history books. Another interesting point to make about Dr. Brindley is that after this ordeal he still got to keep his job and kept on publishing. A special shout-out, then, should definitely go to his employer.

Genius that borders on insanity

Isaac Newton, famous for his three laws of motion that constitute absolute physical truths, also dabbled in life sciences. Indeed, he was not a physician, however as part of his experiments with light and color perception he used a needle and stuck it behind his eyeball to see how shape and color interact. He summarized his experiments in a notebook in his own handwriting. The original copy can be found in the Cambridge University Library.

Education above all

A person who read this article sent me a link to this amazing video. It shows a Massachusetts General Hospital anesthesiologist (now at Baystate Health) who performs a self-cricothyroidotomy and self intubation (!) as part of a course teaching trainees:

Treating STEMI

In 2018, a letter was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. A nurse from a remote rural area in Australia reported treating himself for STEMI. He did everything including start IV lines and administer IV thrombolysis. I would bulk at putting in the IV line. But that is just me…