Self-experiment

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A (medical) self- experiment is the testing of a new medical procedure by its creator on himself. Self-experiments are mostly undertaken in situations in which no other way seems possible to obtain a new medical knowledge or to make it generally public.

History and background

Since the Age of Enlightenment, such self-experiments were even considered indispensable for some time, especially in drug research. The ethical requirement was that researchers should not expose other people to risks that they did not expose themselves to beforehand. In the 18th century , for example, Anton Störck , personal physician to Empress Maria Theresia , demanded a strict sequence of chemical determination, animal experiment and self-experiment by the scientist until clinical experiments on patients were allowed. In the history of science, however, self-experiments were not only undertaken because researchers tried to ward off dangers from others in the early stages of investigation. Self-experiments were also preferred because self-experience of an effect was seen as a necessary part of carrying out an experiment.

Sometimes self-experiments were crowned with great success, sometimes they ended in spectacular failures. In part, important new discoveries were made, but at the expense of the health of those who carried out the self-experiment on themselves.

The effects of many highly effective drugs are tried out in self-experiments; Due to a lack of knowledge and an increased willingness to take risks, the proportion of 14-25 year olds in the number of poisoning victims is disproportionately high.

In a broader sense, the term self-experiment is also used for any trial of a procedure on oneself.

The scientific self-experiment as an ethical exception was included in the Nuremberg Codex in 1947 with regard to still acceptable risks .

Self-experiments are also occasional subjects of films, such as Super Size Me (documentary by Morgan Spurlock about the consumption of extra-large fast food portions at McDonald's for weeks ) or Die Fliege (horror film by David Cronenberg , in which the scientist Seth Brundle uses a " teleporter " tried a self-experiment).

Disadvantages of trying on yourself

Anyone planning a self-experiment is advised against doing this, as there are less dangerous ways to expand medical knowledge today. Often the data collection is incomplete, there is a lack of controls and a sufficient number of cases.

List of famous self-experiments (selection)

  • In 1740, James Jurin (1684–1750) treated his bladder stone disease by taking soapy water.
  • In 1765 the doctor Samuel Bard reported on his pharmacological observations after taking opium.
  • The English surgeon John Hunter allegedly injected the pus of a gonorrhea patient into his own penis in two places in 1767 . He then also developed syphilis .
  • The German doctor Samuel Hahnemann postulated the similarity principle , a pillar of homeopathy , in 1790 when he tested the effect of cinchona bark in a self- experiment. He observed symptoms of malaria on himself after taking this drug . It is possible that Hahnemann's self-observations were an allergic reaction due to a sensitization to quinine , as he had already taken the drug earlier.
  • The English doctor Edward Jenner had noticed in 1794 that girls who had frequent contact with cow's milk on a farm and who became infected with the more harmless disease of cowpox were immune to real smallpox . For this reason, he administered material to himself and other test subjects that he had obtained from cowpox wounds. Here too, the consequence was immunity to real smallpox.
  • In 1804 Friedrich Sertürner was the first to isolate morphine as the most important active substance in opium. The Paderborn pharmacy assistant took three other young people with 1.5 grains (1 grain = 50–60 mg) of morphine each (lethal dose orally approx. 200 mg). By taking an emetic and vomiting caused by the morphine itself, he survived the self-experiment.
  • In the General Hospital in Vienna, the doctor Ferdinand von Hebra (1816–1880) discovered the scabies causative agent, the scabies mite. In a self-experiment he proved that the mite caused the disease.
  • The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud carried out an analysis of his own mental life; he also carried out self- experiments with cocaine .
  • In search of the “universal formula”, the physicist Johann Wilhelm Ritter electrified his own body and galvanized his fingers, later also his tongue and eyeball; these attempts ruined Ritter both healthily and financially.
  • The military doctor and scientist John Paul Stapp carried out risky self-experiments on himself due to various medical questions that arose with the introduction of high-speed jet aircraft and space exploration . He tested the effects and countermeasures of very low air pressure on flights at high altitudes without a pressurized cabin . He also checked whether the human body can withstand the huge gust of wind when flying close to the speed of sound, and was therefore exposed to a head wind of 900 km / h. Most famous, however, were his experiments in which the human body is well secured and exposed to extreme acceleration forces. In 1954 he was exposed to a deceleration peak of more than 450 m / s² in an attempt; He also experienced a deceleration of 250 m / s² during the following second. For comparison: 10 m / s² corresponds to an emergency stop with a car, a jet pilot experiences a maximum of 90–100 m / s². In addition to the injuries to be expected, such as fractures and strains , Stapp was able to explain that the eyes are under the greatest strain due to bleeding and strains on the optic nerve.
  • Werner Forßmann pushed a catheter into his right heart for the first time in 1929 through an arm vein , documented this fact with an X-ray and received the Nobel Prize in 1956 for his subsequent research results.
  • In 1984, the Australian doctor Barry Marshall experimented on himself with a bacterial culture with the stomach bacteria Helicobacter pylori . He soon fell ill with an inflammation of the stomach, which he successfully got rid of with antibiotics . Barry Marshall and his research colleague Robin Warren received the Nobel Prize in 2005 for their discovery of gastric bacteria.
  • Amanita mushroom poisoning and silibinin : In 2000, a Geneva doctor made a self-experiment with 70 grams of amanita mushroom, which he ate, to prove that you can survive poisoning with the "Bastien method" he advocated with many vitamins and especially carrots. Doctors fought successfully for his life for several days.
  • At the age of 74, Max von Pettenkofer swallowed a culture of cholera bacteria in 1892 . Fortunately, he didn't get sick. Nevertheless, the view of his scientific adversary Robert Koch about the bacterial cause of this disease proved to be correct.
  • Robert Koch, for his part, injected himself with a drug against tuberculosis in 1890 , the alleged vaccine tuberculin . He also included his second wife Hedwig Freiberg in the experiments. Both became seriously ill from the side effects.
  • The American doctor and epidemiologist Joseph Goldberger researched the cause of pellagra in the southern United States . Contrary to the prevailing opinion at the beginning of the 20th century that it was an infectious disease , he took the view that it was due to malnutrition in those affected. In order to support his thesis, he allegedly had the blood of pellagic patients injected under his skin and swallowed capsules containing the skin, urine and stool of pellagic patients. He didn't get sick. He discovered that a deficiency in vitamin B caused the disease and that brewing yeast could easily remedy this deficiency.
  • The American doctor Evan O'Neill Kane made medical history in 1929 when he personally removed his inflamed appendix in an operation. Leonid Rogozov repeated this pioneering act on April 30, 1961 - unlike Evan O'Neill Kane, not out of the joy of experimentation, but out of sheer need. At the time of his appendicitis, Rogozov was the only doctor in a Soviet Antarctic station and around 3000 km from the nearest hospital.
  • In 1943 Albert Hofmann discovered the substance lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in the laboratories of the Basle company Sandoz after experiments with ergot fungus . On April 19, 1943, he conducted a self-experiment with the newly synthesized LSD and described the hallucinations caused by the substance. According to his own account, he reduced the effects of the considerable overdose by asking his neighbor for milk. Despite the effects of LSD, he knew that it would be helpful against symptoms of intoxication in many cases.
  • The medical student Daniel Alcides Carrión clarified the connection between oroya fever and the so-called Peruvian warts "Verrugae peruanae" (reddish skin nodules) by injecting bloody wart secretion in a self-experiment. A few weeks later he became seriously ill and eventually died of Oroya fever. Like him, many thousands of workers fared when building the railway from Lima to Oroya . More than 80% died of fever and severe anemia. Those who survived later developed Peruvian warts . Alcides Carrión described the disease after becoming infected with the disease at his own request from a close friend. After he died of the disease, his friend was arrested and charged with murder. The Berlin-born doctor Max Kuczynski repeated Carrión's self-experiment in 1938 and survived. Carrión was declared a national hero by the government of Peru and in 1965 the Universidad Nacional Daniel Alcides Carrión was named after him.
  • British biologist David Pritchard infected himself with hookworms . He wanted to find out whether people who have hookworms in their intestines suffer less from allergies. Most of all, it itched incredibly when the worms penetrated my skin.
  • In 1954, Jonas Salk developed the first vaccine against poliomyelitis caused by viruses . To prove the harmlessness of his dead vaccine , in which the polioviruses were killed with formalin , Salk first tested it on himself in 1953.
  • In 1983, urologist Giles Brindley claimed to have found a cure for impotence , which was then untreatable . Since he was not believed, he injected the vasodilator phenoxybenzamine into his own penis during the Urology Congress in Las Vegas. During his lecture he then showed the audience his erect member to convince them of his views.
  • William Thomas Green Morton tried sulfur ether on himself before he became the founder of modern anesthesia with its public demonstration as an anesthetic.
  • On November 4, 1847, James Young Simpson and friends experimented with the effects of inhaled chloroform . Since then, Simpson has been considered the inventor of chloroform anesthesia.
  • The pioneer of local anesthesia applicable Karl Koller made at the suggestion of Sigmund Freud self-experiments with cocaine. Around 1885, the surgeon William Stewart Halsted , who invented circuit anesthesia with local anesthetics, became addicted to cocaine. His assistants Hartley and Hall, who also contributed to the development of local anesthesia through experiments on themselves, also developed drug addiction.
  • On August 24, 1898, the surgeon August Bier and his assistant August Hildebrandt tried to inject each other with a local anesthetic into the spinal canal. In the case of the beer injection, the first spinal anesthesia was performed on this day .
  • Harriet Edgeworth from the United States, herself affected by myasthenia gravis symptoms , found that ephedrine improved her muscle strength. In 1933, after a first, she published a more comprehensive second report on her long-term experiments.

See also

literature

  • Lawrence K. Altman: Who Goes First? The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine. (1st ed. 1987) Wellingborough 1988 (English).
  • Werner Forßmann: Self-experiment: memories of a surgeon . Hüthig Verlag 2002. ISBN 360916056X .
  • Seth Roberts & Allen Neuringer: Self-Experimentation , In: Handbook of Research Methods in Human Operant Behavior by Kennon A. Lattal & M. Perone (Eds.), Pp. 619-655. New York: Plenum Press (English).
  • John Hunter's original work on STD : www.marshall.edu (English).
  • Pierre Bourdieu: A sociological self-experiment . Suhrkamp-Verlag 2002 (edition suhrkamp 2311), ISBN 3518123114 .
  • Andreas-Holger Maehle: Self -experiments and subjective experience in opium research in the 18th century. In: Würzburg medical history reports. Volume 13, 1995, pp. 287-297.
  • Andreas-Holger Maehle: Self -experiments , medical. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 1318.
  • Christa Wolf : self-experiment. Tract to a protocol (1973) (In it she reports on a gender change as a self-experiment. Source: Sinn und Form 25 (1973) 2, 301–323).

Web links

Wiktionary: Self-experiment  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Andreas-Holger Maehle (2005).
  2. ↑ Andreas-Holger Maehle (2005).
  3. ↑ Andreas-Holger Maehle (2005).
  4. ↑ Barbara I. Tshisuaka: Halsted, William Stewart. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 530.
  5. ↑ F. Povacz: history of trauma surgery. ISBN 978-3-662-07477-0 , p. 107 ( Google Books ).
  6. ↑ Peter Oehme: Spinal cord anesthesia with cocaine: The priority controversy on lumbar anesthesia. In: Deutsches Ärzteblatt. 1998; 95 (41), pp. A-2556 / B-2180 / C-1935 ( online ).
  7. ↑ Harriet Edgeworth: The effect of Ephedrine in the treatment of Myasthenia gravis: Second Report. In: Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA). Volume 100, No. 18, 1933, p. 1401.