Many doctors spend years of their lives studying medicine. It is an arduous lifestyle that requires dedication and commitment. But the reward of saving a life? Priceless.
Doctors can help parents from losing their children. They can lessen the pain and suffering of diseases that are painfully fatal to the human body. They can ease the severity of certain ailments that would otherwise leave most people unable to perform basic tasks.
Doctors possess a level of compassion not many other professions in this world provide. Their boundless diligence to the art of saving lives is something to behold.
However, some individuals have gone above and beyond their call of duty in the name of medicine.
These individuals, in their desperation for the sake of medicine, have vouched to use their bodies as a means of understanding diseases that afflict the human body. This is something that is usually never recommended for any doctor to do.
But the bravery and courage displayed by these doctors in the service of humanity should be applauded. They’ve put their life on the line for the lives of many more in their time and the distant future. Here are the stories of some of these practitioners of medicine that go above their way to advance a field of medicine that we were left in the dark for.
Barry Marshal, It takes guts
Barry Marshall, an Australian Physician
Australian physician Barry Marshall and his partner J. Robin Warren were researching gut bacteria and the idea that certain bacteria (H. Pylori in this case) could bring about gastrointestinal diseases that cause stomach ulcers.
Their research into the matter was challenging and many of their research proposals brought about roadblocks that failed. This was mostly since doctors at the time didn’t acknowledge the idea of bacteria existing in the gut, as it would have supposedly been difficult for such bacteria to ever exist in stomach acid.
Marshall was undeterred by the common consensus on this matter, so to prove his point, Marshall drank a solution of H. Pylori himself. The initial idea was he’d get a stomach ulcer in a year. However, he had rapidly developed symptoms in a couple of days which included nausea, halitosis (bad breath), and vomiting.
An endoscopy later, Marshall was able to prove his hypothesis. H. Pylori had infected his stomach and needed to be treated with antibiotics to prevent fatal gastrointestinal diseases and inflammation from claiming his life.
No doubt this was a painful ordeal, but Barry Marshall and J. Robin Warren were well rewarded for their effort with a Nobel prize.
If anyone’s got guts, it’s this man right here.
Jesse William Lazear- The “Accidental” Infection
Lazear was an American physician who had performed his duty as an assistant surgeon for the US Army in Cuba. He and his colleagues were commissioned to study yellow fever and its transmission as part of the Yellow Fever Board. Yellow fever is a deadly disease that is spread with the bite of mosquitos, and at the time, it was extremely viral.
Lazear in 1881 had confirmed the hypothesis from another epidemiologist, Carlos Finlay, that the disease was spread with mosquito bites. He even wrote a letter to his wife in 1900 stating that he was supposedly on his way to discovering the real germ. But it was difficult to further study the disease at that current state.
To better understand the fever, Lazear deliberately infected himself by letting a mosquito carrying the disease bite him.
Lazear though, proclaimed it was an accidental infection. In that, he had mistaken the mosquito that had bit him for another mosquito that was ‘supposedly’ uninfected.
After the infection, Lazear got enough time to study the disease before sadly passing away on the 26th of September 1900.
The reason he likely had lied about this was to ensure his family did not lose out on insurance after his death. The truth of his ‘accidental’ exposure to the fever was eventually revealed in his medical journals.
Lazear’s sacrifice was not in vain. His study greatly helped in understanding yellow fever and develop measures to mitigate the spread of the fever that time before the introduction of a vaccine many years later.
To many, Lazear is seen as a martyr, with memorials dedicated to honor his bravery and sacrifice in the name of medicine.
Werner Forssman- Staring at His Own Heart
Forssmann was a physician specializing in cardiology from Germany whose research into heart catheterization was pivotal in developing many modern cardiology practices. For his work, he was criticized for taking such a bold risk, which was bad enough to force him to move from cardiology to urology. However, his work was later recognized by the Nobel committee and Forssmann was awarded a Nobel prize in physiology or medicine.
But how did this German physician come to discover heart catheterization? Dr. Forssmann came to hypothesize the procedure after reading a sketch from a physiology textbook of a long thin tube is inserted inside a horse’s jugular vein. There he theorized that one could also reach into the heart with a tube, though not through the jugular, but instead through the vein. To prove his theory, he needed to experiment, but that wouldn’t be so easy…
This was highly risky. If improperly inserted, the tube could intrude upon sensitive parts of the heart which could be fatal. Forssmann, however, was determined to prove his point.
In 1929, he tricked a nurse by convincing her she’d be the first human guinea pig for this risky procedure. The nurse strapped herself to a chair and left Forssmann with the necessary equipment to carry out the procedure. Forssmann instead anesthetized his arm and inserted a urinary catheter, much to the horror of the poor nurse witnessing it. Forssmann threaded the tube partway before releasing the nurse from her binds to inform the X-ray department.
Walking (yes walking) to the X-Ray facility with the tube still up in his hand, they were able to take some images, but it wasn’t enough. Dr. Forssmann insisted he needed better pictures, so he painfully pushed the tube further up his arm. At a point, the tube had struck a vein and the German physician needed to suppress his urge to let out a cough to avoid damaging his veins and ending his life there and then.
Finally, the painful procedure came to an end when Dr. Forssmann’s technician snapped the pictures that he needed to prove his hypothesis. His initial reward? Condemnation from the German medical community and an infamous reputation among his peers. This procedure was incredibly daring and unfathomably risky. But Forssmann’s discovery was integral in understanding procedures that would eventually advance the field of cardiology to what it is today. The German physician peered into his own human heart, and eventually, helped save the hearts of other humans much like him.