How far would you go to find the answers to a medical mystery?
Would you go as far as Stubbins Ffirth, a 19th century doctor who smeared himself with vomit and other bodily fluids from yellow-fever suffers to prove it wasn’t a contagious disease?
Or tape a sample of radium salts to your arm for 10 hours as Pierre Cuire did in his desire to find out how radiation might help in the treatment of cancer?
Probably not.
Read more about these and other extraordinary scientists who put their lives on the line for the sake of knowledge at New Scientist’s fascinating (and somewhat gross) article Eight scientists who became their own guinea pigs.
(image by Gaetan Lee)