SACRIFICES BY DOCTORS

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXIII, Issue 4456, 21 August 1922, Page 4

SACRIFICES BY DOCTORS

SELF-EXPERIMENTS IN PROGRESS

The April magazine of the Research Defence Society contains an investing article under the heading of "Self-Experiment” After quoting several famous instances of self-ex-periment the article continues': “A good modern instance is -Dr. Head’s experiment on .his own arm. He described it to the Royal Commission on Experiments on Animals, November 27, 1907. He pointed out to them how incomplete ihad been the knowledge of the distribution of nerves on the surface of the body, and how inconclusive were the observations made on patients. So he determined to have three nerves divided in his own arm. The pperatiop, bf course, was done under anaesthesia. ‘This was done with the most successful results ; the questions that we put by iur operation were answered immediately, with: a clearness that we could not obtain by any other means ; and for five years we have been working cut the results of that experiment.’

“Another famous self-experiment was that made some twenty years ago by Dr. Sambpn and Dr. Low, who lived for six months in a mosquito-proof hut rear Ostia, and thus proved that malaria is carried by mosquitoes; Again, in 1900, mosquitoes containing malaria were imported from Rome to the London School of Tropical Medicine, and young Dr. Mapspn and Mr Warren allowed themselves tp be bitten by some thirty of the mosquitoes. They were duly infected with malaria, and their blood contained ‘■he

identical form of; the malaria parasite "syhicli had been in the mosquitoes. Equally remarkable were the selfexperiments with yellow fever made in fhe early days by many American doctors, who tried every horiiible method of infecting themselves; and finally the self-experiments made under the United States Commission on Yellow Fever in 1900. Again, the protective treatments against typhoid, cholera, and plague were all of them tried by large bodies of 1 men interested in these discoveries. Again, it is pleasant to no.te an episode mentioned by Major-General Sir David Bruce, that at the beginning of the war certain self-experiments were made with anti-tetanic serum, to ascertain its durability in the blood. Volunteers were called in from the London School of Medicine for Women. ‘About a dozen young ladies came forward, each was inoculated with 500 units of anti-tetanic serum,, and at weekly intervals a specimen of blood was removed from each, and examined for the presence of anti-tpxin. In this way it was shown that after ten days or a fortnight' the amount of antitoxin in the blood was greatly diminished.’ It was on work of this kind that the practice of giving more than one dose of anti-tetanic serum was founded. Last of all, during the war, volunteers in the American army submitted themselves to be finely bitten by lice, and in this way proved that trench-fever was conveyed by lice.”