Healers and researchers who swallowed poisons, practiced madness, and fought for truths no one wanted to hear. The path to medical knowledge is paved with brave and bizarre experiments.
In 1887, Nellie Bly practiced deranged expressions in a mirror for one night, then got herself committed to a New York asylum. She spent ten days documenting rotten food, ice baths, and patients tied together with ropes. Her exposé triggered a grand jury investigation and forced the city to overhaul its asylum system. The doctors who had unanimously declared her insane never explained how a twenty-three-year-old reporter had fooled them all.
In 1847, Ignaz Semmelweis figured out that doctors were carrying death on their hands from autopsy room to delivery ward. He made them wash. The death rate dropped from eighteen percent to under two. The medical establishment called it an insult, not science. They dismissed him, committed him to an asylum, and when he tried to leave, guards beat him. He died two weeks later of septicemia — a hand infection. The same disease, in the same place, he'd tried to stop.
Tarrare was so hungry he ate cats, snakes, and live puppies whole. The French military thought a man who could swallow anything could swallow secrets, so they sent him behind enemy lines with documents in his gut. He was captured immediately — he didn't speak German. He died at twenty-six. When surgeons opened him, his gullet was so wide they could see straight into his stomach, and the smell was so terrible they abandoned the autopsy.