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Most people would go to a surgeon for an operation, but not everyone. Take a look at some of history's auto-surgical pioneers, from the Founding Father who stuck whalebone where he shouldn't have to the only known woman to have given herself a C-section.
0:00 Intro
1:10 Leonid Rogozov
2:02 Robert Kerr McLaren
2:19 Gouverneur Morris
3:14 Inés Ramírez Pérez
4:07 Peter Freuchen
5:25 Evan O'Neill Kane
6:08 M. Alexandre Fzaicou
6:42 Amanda Feilding
7:35 Charles-Auguste Clever de Maldigny
8:40 Werner Theodor Otto Forssmann
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10 People Who Operated on Themselves | Mental Floss
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0:00
In April 1961, Leonid Rogozov found himself in a bit of a pickle. The 27-year-old surgeon was
0:06
part of a Soviet expedition to Antarctica when he got sick with what he eventually realized was
0:10
appendicitis. There were no other doctors on the expedition. No problem, he'd just take a flight
0:15
out, right? Wrong. The weather made flying anywhere impossible, not to mention the fact
0:20
that travel back to Russia by sea took almost 40 days. So Rogozov, who wrote in his journal that
0:25
the pain felt like a snowstorm whipping through my soul, wailing like a hundred jackals, decided
0:31
that the only option he had if he wanted to live was to take a scalpel to himself
0:35
Hi, I'm Erin McCarthy, Editor-in-Chief of Mental Floss, and this is The List Show
0:39
If you want something done right, do it yourself is an old adage that doesn't seem like it would
0:44
apply to major surgery. But for a handful of people, cutting themselves open to relieve a
0:48
condition seemed like a good idea, or their only option. Rogozoff is just the tip of the
0:54
autosurgical iceberg. In this episode, we're going to look at everyone from the founding father who
0:58
stuck a whalebone where he shouldn't have, to the only known woman to have given herself a C-section
1:03
Let's get started. Okay, so what do you do if you're stuck in Antarctica and you need to operate on yourself
1:14
Rogozov first got the necessary permission all the way from Moscow, then enlisted three of his
1:18
colleagues to be his assistants during the surgery. They would hand him the instruments he needed and
1:23
hold a mirror so he could see what he was doing. He instructed them to inject him with adrenaline
1:28
if he passed out, and even told them to perform artificial ventilation if necessary. Then he
1:33
injected Novocaine into his abdomen and got to work. He later wrote that although he was terrified
1:38
somehow I automatically switched into operating mode, and from that point on I didn't notice
1:43
anything else. The surgery was not easy. Rogozov had to discard the mirror and work by touch
1:49
but the surgeon did eventually reach his appendix, remove it, and stitch himself up in around two
1:54
hours. Good thing, too. After looking at the organ, he estimated it would have burst within a day
1:59
Rogozov went back to work two weeks later. This is kind of wild to say, but Rogozov isn't the
2:04
only person to have taken out their own appendix. There's also the Australian veterinary surgeon
2:09
Robert Kerr McLaren, who removed the organ in a jungle in the Philippines, sans anesthesia in the
2:14
in the 1940s, and Dr. Evan Kane, who we'll mention a bit later in this video
2:18
You might not know Governor Morris name but you probably read his work He tweaked some of the language of the Constitution earning himself the moniker the penman of the Constitution He was also a U senator a one minister to France and has the dubious distinction
2:32
of being the only Founding Father to stick a whalebone in his penis, at least that we
2:36
know about. Here's what happened. In 1816, Morris's health was on the decline
2:41
In addition to having a raging case of gout, he was also having trouble urinating, possibly
2:45
due to a urinary tract infection. He was unable to pee and was, understandably, probably freaking out
2:51
So he decided to grab a piece of whalebone that may have come from his wife's corset and stick it up there in an attempt to clear the blockage
2:57
He had maybe done it once before with a piece of flexible hickory, and it had worked like
3:01
a charm. So he likely had reasonable confidence that this too would be successful
3:06
It wasn't. Mars ended up with a penile infection and died on November 6th, 1816
3:11
Let this be a lesson to us all. You probably don't need us to tell you that moms are amazing
3:17
But Inez Ramirez Perez took it to a whole new level. The 40-year-old was at home at a remote location in southern Mexico in March 2000 when she
3:24
went into labor. The nearest clinic was over 50 miles away, and she had no way to get there
3:29
The labor was difficult, and Perez had previously had a stillbirth. So after 12 hours with no baby, she took some shots of hard liquor and used a 6-inch knife
3:38
to cut the baby out. They both survived. There were, reportedly, no witnesses to the actual surgery, but one of the doctors who
3:44
examined her 12 hours after the birth, said that it was evident this surgery was not done by anyone
3:50
with medical knowledge. There is no doctor or healer in the village, and it is highly doubtful
3:55
that anyone would have been able to do this to her. If they had, it is such a small town
3:59
the word would have spread quickly, and we would have known. Perez is believed to be the only person
4:03
to have ever successfully given themselves a C-section. Legendary Danish explorer Peter
4:08
Freuchen was made of tough stuff. In the 1920s, he returned to an Arctic base from out on the
4:13
tundra, where he had survived an intense snowstorm. His left foot was in bad shape
4:18
Gangrene began to develop. Freuchen wrote that the flesh fell away until the bones protruded
4:23
There were no doctors on sight, but Freuchen was attended to by an indigenous woman who said she
4:27
had experience with frozen limbs. He would later write that when a man is sick and cold and lonely
4:32
he gets strange ideas. And one day I told the nurse that I wanted to have those toes off
4:37
She agreed that that was best, and volunteered to bite his toes off at the joint, which Freuchen
4:42
explained would prevent the ghosts from occupying my body because her mouth would close the wounds immediately He thanked her but went with his own toe removal method instead He put a nail puller
4:54
over each toe and, in his words, banked it off with a hammer. He would eventually lose his whole
4:59
leg after this incident, but that didn't slow him down. Freuchen was part of the Danish resistance
5:04
movement against the Nazis and aided Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. When he was captured
5:08
by the Nazis and sentenced to death, he escaped. He starred in a movie and won the game show The
5:13
$64,000 Question. And he also claimed to have once made a tool out of his own frozen poop to
5:18
chisel his way out of an ice pit. Yet another example of desperate times calling for desperate
5:23
measures. Operating on yourself feels like an experience you wouldn't want to repeat
5:28
But that wasn't the case for Dr. Evan O'Neill Kane, a Pennsylvania-based surgeon who, in 1919
5:33
amputated his own finger. Then in 1921, he decided to do a self-surgery for science
5:39
He was wary of general anesthesia, so Kane tested whether or not local anesthetic would
5:43
work by giving himself an appendectomy. And he actually needed it. Kane suffered from chronic
5:49
appendicitis. After the surgery, he told the New York Times, I now know exactly how the patient
5:54
feels when being operated upon under local treatment, and that was one of the objects
5:58
I had in mind when I determined to perform the operation myself. About a decade later
6:02
the 70-year-old surgeon operated on his own hernia caused by taking a tumble from a horse
6:08
Kane wasn't the only doctor to operate on his own hernia, or even the first. In 1909
6:13
26-year-old Romanian surgeon M. Alexandre Zycu removed a hen's egg-sized inguinal hernia
6:18
which the Medical News today describes as a condition in which some of the contents of
6:22
the abdominal cavity push through a weak spot in the wall of the abdomen and form a painful
6:27
swelling in the groin area. Yowch. It took Zyku a few times to get the right injection spot, but
6:33
once he did and the drugs kicked in, he sat upright and cut into himself, ultimately performing
6:38
an hour-long surgery. Twelve days later, he was back at work. In 1970, UK native Amanda Fielding
6:44
who was interested in how to access deeper parts of her consciousness, decided to drill a hole into
6:49
her own skull, a practice known as trepanation. It's one of the world's oldest known surgeries and
6:54
and dates back at least 7,000 years. Fielding thought that doing so would potentially increase
6:58
blood circulation to her brain, though there was a lack of evidence for this. Fielding used a dental
7:03
drill to bore a hole in her forehead as blood spurted from the wound and she recorded the whole thing When the footage was screened at the PsyDem Gallery in New York in 1978 it caused some audience members to faint It not a difficult operation she would later say adding
7:19
Drilling a hole in one's head is really a nerve battle. Doing something which obviously every instinct in your body is against
7:26
In a sense, it's quite satisfying that one can overcome one's nerves to do it
7:30
Fielding would later undergo trepanation a second time, albeit with someone else doing
7:34
the drilling. Bladder stones are horrifically painful. And just a few hundred years ago, the surgery to remove them sounds like a whole other form of torture
7:43
Surgeons would stick a finger in the patient's rectum to locate the bladder, then go through the perineum, you know, that stretch between the genitals and the anus
7:50
to make a small incision in the organ. Next, they'd use forceps or something called a scoop extractor to remove the stones
7:58
After that, they'd apparently just let the wounds heal. All on their own
8:02
No sewing anything up. The procedure, known as the lefotomy, was notorious for its high mortality rate
8:08
And rather than sit for another horrific operation, surgeon Charles-Auguste Claver de Maldigny, who'd had many rounds of bladder stones before
8:16
opted to relieve his agony himself. With the help of a mirror, he sliced into his bladder and pulled
8:22
out a stone that had apparently formed around a surgical sponge left in during one of his
8:26
previous operations. And he didn't die. But he also didn't get rid of his ultimate foe
8:31
the bladder stone forever. When they returned years later, he opted to have someone else remove
8:35
them using a new and less invasive procedure called a lithotriety. Finally, let's head to
8:40
Germany in 1929, where Dr. Werner Theodor Otto Forsman had developed an experimental plan to
8:46
catheterize the heart for operations, like repairing mitral valve defects. He submitted
8:51
it to his hospital's chief of surgery, who refused to allow any patients to undergo the
8:55
procedure. When Forsman offered himself as the patient, the chief refused again. Undaunted
9:00
Forsman enlisted a nurse, who volunteered to act as the patient. But when they got in the operating
9:05
room, Forsman merely pantomimed performing the surgery on her, and actually catheterized himself
9:10
Classic bait and switch. Afterward, he apparently walked out to the x-ray department to see if he'd
9:15
reached his heart. He hadn't, and needed to insert the catheter a little further
9:19
He would later win the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for 1956 alongside
9:23
André Frederic Cornand and Dickinson W. Richards. Thanks for watching this episode of The List Show
9:29
I hope the operation was a success. Don't forget to subscribe to stay up to date with all things mental floss, and I'll
9:35
see you next time
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