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 seemed to come from the sea, as most patients had been swimming prior to the onset of symptoms. Barnes winnowed down the possible causes to a species of tiny, nearly transparent box jellyfish. To test this theory, the doctor stung himself with the tentacle of the Carukia barnesi. He was not alone, though. Probably losing his shot at “father of the year,” he also stung his nine-year-old son, as well as a young lifeguard. (It’s not documented how Barnes knew the lifeguard or how he talked the lifeguard into it.) Not long after being stung, all three had to be hospitalized for their excruciating pain. All three test subjects made complete recoveries, though there was no word on how the ordeal affected the Barnes’ father-son dynamic.
Once Bitten…
If you have ever been stung by a bee, you probably called it “painful.” If you have been bitten by a bullet ant, you might call it a “pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch nail embedded in your heel.” Thankfully, you do not need to be bitten by a bullet ant, because biologist Justin Schmidt already has. Schmidt has let himself been stung and bitten by nearly a thousand painful creatures, taking careful notes along the way. He created the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, a way of quantifying and describing the pain that insects inflict, which is both elucidating and entertaining, in a schadenfreude kind of way. Schmidt ranked each insect sting on a rising scale of one to four and described each incident rather lyrically. The sting of the sweat bee registered a one on the pain scale and felt “Light and ephemeral. Almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.” Garnering a score of two, a yellowjacket’s sting was described as being “hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.” At a three, the sting of the Maricopa harvester ant was described as “after eight unrelenting hours of drilling into that ingrown toenail, you find the drill wedged into the toe.” The description of the warrior wasp sting, which scored a four and lasted for hours, showed Schmidt’s realization of the absurdity of his bodily sacrifice: “Torture. You are chained in the flow of an active volcano. Why did I start this list?” The stand-out entry is the tarantula hawk, widely regarded as the most painful sting yet discovered by man: “Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair dryer has been dropped into your bubble bath. A bolt out of the heavens. Lie down and scream.”
The tarantula hawk. Stay away.
In the late 1990s, Kevin Warwick had a silicon chip transponder implanted into his forearm. According to his website, the neural interface allowed him to “operate doors, lights, heaters and other computers without lifting a finger.” The experiment was called Project Cyborg.
Negative Findings
Not everyone got a shiny medal or professional acclaim for their self-experimentation. Some merely got maimed or killed. Scottish inventor, scientist, and writer Sir David Brewster, had a particular interest in optics and light polarization, a field of study which requires good eyesight. Unfortunately for Brewster, he performed a chemical experiment in 1831 which nearly blinded him. His vision returned, but he was plagued with eye troubles for the rest of his life. His legacy in vision did not result from any experiment, but from his invention, the kaleidoscope. Also in the sacrificing-sight-for-science club was Robert Bunsen, best known giving his name to the Bunsen burner (and an under-appreciated Muppet). He began his scientific career in organic chemistry, but nearly died twice of arsenic poisoning. Soon thereafter, he lost the sight in his right eye to an explosion of cacodyl cyanide. These being excellent reasons to change fields, Bunsen moved to inorganic chemistry, where he developed the field of spectroscopy, which measures and examines light and radiation.
See Right Through You
Elizabeth Fleischman Ascheim was not a doctor herself, but worked in the office of her brother-in-law, Dr. Michael J.H. Woolf. Woolf was intrigued by the new discovery of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen: x-rays. Ascheim became equally interested and, with Woolf’s encouragement, gave up her job as a bookkeeper to study electrical science. In 1897, she bought an x-ray machine, the first in San Francisco, which she moved into the office. The duo spent nine years experimenting with the machine, using themselves as subjects. The effects of long-term exposure to x-rays was not understood at the time, and their protective measures in place were inadequate. Ascheim died of widespread, aggressive cancer.
New Blood
It may have been the quest for eternal youth that led Russian physician, economist, and science fiction writer, Alexander Bogdanov
