But the babies sure are cute!
When you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. This philosophy is okay when it comes to loading the dishwasher, but maybe not when you are trying find the cause of venereal disease. No one told that to John Hunter. Medical types in the eighteenth century medical believed gonorrhea and syphilis were caused by the same pathogen. Hunter injected himself with gonorrhea to test the theory. He contracted gonorrhea and syphilis, most likely from using the same needle to get the samples. His is just one of many sometimes-harrowing stories of doctors and scientists using themselves as test subjects.
Isaac Newton. That wig is working.
Better than a Poke in the Eye
Let’s start with one of the OGs of science, Isaac Newton. Newton had many areas of interest beyond fruit-based physics. For the sake of science, Newton stuck a needle in his eye. He thought that if he slid a long needle called a bodkin between his eyeball and eye socket, his vision would change. It did! He saw different colors and dots of light that appeared when he applied pressure. It’s the same lights that you see if you press on your eyes, called phosphenes. Newton also stared at the sun in a mirror, repeatedly, until the image of the sun stayed when he closed his eye. It stayed for months, in fact. He had to spend three days in a dark room until it faded enough for him to resume his daily life.
Huff-rey Davies
While at the Medical Pneumatic Institute of Bristol in the 1790s, Humphrey Davy studied gases. Studied by inhaling, in case the theme of this section was still in any way unclear. Davy would set up chemical reactions and inhale the resulting gas. One gas gave him a pleasant sensation and impulse to laugh at everything; he had discovered nitrous oxide, a.k.a. laughing gas. Though his efforts were meant to reproduce the pleasurable effects of things like alcohol and opium, Davy would ultimately recommend nitrous oxide for use as an anesthetic. Modern dentists use a blend of 50 percent nitrous and 50 percent oxygen, but Davy was huffing 100 percent nitrous, which is probably why he enjoyed it enough to start hosting parties where friends would inhale it from silk bags.
“Could You Patent the Sun?”
When it came time to test his polio vaccine, Dr. Jonas Salk decided the only suitable test subject was himself…and his family. In 1947, Salk was working on a vaccine for the crippling disease at the University of Pittsburgh. He needed a healthy volunteer to test it, and administered it to himself, his wife, and their three sons. It worked and the vaccine was soon tested nationwide and showed dramatic results. In two years, cases of polio decreased from about 29,000 to 6,000. Salk did not patent the vaccine and insisted that it remain free and available to everyone. Thus, he is often remembered as one of history’s great humanitarians.
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
