The Man Who Drank the Plague

In 1802, yellow fever was the most terrifying disease in the Americas. Napoleon had just lost 29,000 troops to it in the Caribbean. No one knew how it spread, and caregivers abandoned the dying rather than risk infection.

Stubbins Ffirth, a twenty-year-old medical student at the University of Pennsylvania, decided to prove it wasn't contagious.

He began by making a small incision in his arm and rubbing fresh black vomit from a yellow fever patient directly into the wound. He developed mild inflammation. It passed in three days. So he escalated. He poured vomit into his eyes. He dripped it into his nostrils. He fried three ounces of it in a pan and inhaled the steam. He built himself a small closet — a kind of vomit sauna — and sat in it, breathing deeply, surrounded by six ounces of heated bile from the dying.

Then he drank it. He noted the taste was "very slightly acid" and that his pulse, seventy-six beats per minute, did not change. He did it again. And again.

He never got sick. He declared victory, submitted his dissertation, and graduated.

He was right that he couldn't catch it from vomit. But not because yellow fever isn't contagious. It's transmitted by mosquitoes. His patients had simply passed the infectious stage. The vomit was harmless before he ever touched it.

He'd built the most disgusting experiment in medical history on expired virus.