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Among the most famous cases of self-experimentation, we pay a tribute to Werner Forssmann for cardiac catheterization in 1924, he who inserted a long catheter in the vein of his elbow and pushed it up to the right heart. The method was further developed by others and it proved useful to examine the heart, its blood pressure, and helped in the development of other techniques such as open-heart surgery, and refinements of anesthesia. There were extensions of Forssmann's idea. He was awarded the Nobel Prize with Cornand and Richards in 1957.
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Forssmann's self-experiments
We owe the discovery of quinine and the understanding of malaria, which is the number one fatal disease in the world, to self-experiments and namely to Patrick Manson. In 1844, he observed his patients suffering from fever, days and nights in China where he took a medical post on the island of Formosa. He finally came to the conclusion that elephantiasis was caused by filarial embryos found in the stomach of mosquitoes. The learned world did not believe it and doctors in London were skeptical.
Now, we know that Manson saw right and his work had opened the path to tropical medicine. He was a generous person and despite the difficulty of getting a grant from the Royal Society when he returned to London, he was not bitter and shared everything he knew about malaria. He also received the Nobel Prize with Ronald Ross who benefited immensely from Manson's knowledge of the disease.
The effects of cocaine and morphine have been described through the self-experiments of physiologist Paolo Mantegazza in 1859, who after chewing the coca leaves, described the pleasurable feeling that he experienced. Subsequent work has mainly consisted of improvements or developments of existing methods and animal experimentation came later to validate what was already known.
We suggest the reading of this book.
Glaser Hugo. "The Drama of Medicine: Doctors risk their lives in research." The scientific book Club (1962)
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