20 Patients Whose Bodies Accidentally Changed Medicine Forever

While Phineas Gage was working as a railroad foreman in Vermont, the 25-year-old was setting an explosive charge when a blast drove an iron rod through his skull, destroying much of his left frontal lobe. He survived. His physician, John Martyn Harlow, reported such a personality change that friends said “he was no longer Gage,” the first clinical description of the role of the frontal lobe in personality. Gage went on to live for over ten years, working as a stagecoach driver in Chile before he died.

In the early 1900s, Mary Mallon worked as a cook for high-society families in New York City. A sanitary engineer named George Soper eventually figured out that she was responsible for several outbreaks of typhoid fever, despite being entirely symptom-free herself. Mallon didn’t believe in germs and continued to work in various households under different aliases. She was incarcerated on a New York island two times by public health officials, for a total of almost 30 years, until she perished there.

Carrie Buck was a 21-year-old woman committed to a state hospital in Virginia after she got pregnant as a result of being raped by a relative of the family she was adopted into. Eugenicists constructed a test case against her, fabricating charges of feeble-mindedness against her, her mother, and her daughter. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote the Supreme Court’s opinion supporting sterilization, stating that “three generations of imbeciles are enough,” and Buck was sterilized shortly thereafter. The ruling paved the way for tens of thousands more forced sterilizations in the decades that followed until the Supreme Court later overturned it. Only recently, a closer look at Buck’s case revealed she was never mentally disabled in the first place.

In the late 18th century, Charles Byrne, a 22-year-old Irish man who was known as the “Irish Giant,” stood more than seven-and-a-half feet tall due to a tumor on his pituitary gland. Fearing that his remains would be dissected by anatomists, he made arrangements for his corpse to be encased in a lead coffin and dropped into the ocean when he passed away. But the anatomist John Hunter paid off the undertakers, stole his body, and dissected him, finding that there was indeed an enlarged cavity where the pituitary gland sits, which provided the first solid evidence that gigantism arose from disease in the pituitary gland.

A 9-year-old boy named Joseph Meister, from Alsace, had been bitten repeatedly by a rabid dog and was brought to Paris, where any symptoms of rabies were universally fatal. A chemist named Louis Pasteur, without a medical degree or license, found a doctor who would administer an unproven vaccine to Meister, made from a dried rabbit spinal cord, delivered through a series of inoculations over ten days. Meister did not develop rabies. It was the first evidence that a vaccine could treat an active virus in a host, as opposed to only preventing infection.

Known to history as “Little Albert,” the 9-month-old baby boy was healthy when he became the subject of an experiment by Johns Hopkins University psychologists John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner. They repeatedly paired a tame white rat with a loud, frightening noise until Albert became afraid of it. The fear then generalized to other white, furry things as well. He never recovered from the phobia because his mother moved away before Watson could try to undo the experiment. Historians are still arguing over which of two children with very different destinies was actually Little Albert.

A 14-year-old boy named Leonard Thompson, barely 65 pounds, had been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. The researchers at the University of Toronto, led by Frederick Banting, first tried insulin on Thompson, but the impure extract caused an allergic reaction and did little to help the boy’s blood sugar. Purified insulin produced by chemist James Collip quickly brought down Thompson’s blood sugar and removed the complication that would otherwise have killed him. Thompson lived another 13 years and eventually died of pneumonia. That was evidence that insulin could keep a dying patient alive.

James Phipps was an 8-year-old boy, the son of the gardener employed by Edward Jenner, a country physician in England. Jenner had collected some pus from the cowpox lesions of a young milkmaid called Sarah Nelmes and injected it into Phipps in order to test a rural folk theory that cowpox conferred immunity against smallpox. Some weeks later, Jenner challenged the child with live smallpox, a challenge that would be outlawed today on any number of grounds. The boy did not develop smallpox. Vaccination was born and would eventually contribute to the elimination of smallpox.

Albert Alexander was a 43-year-old Oxford police constable who was dying of a nasty infection after scratching his face on a rose bush. An Oxford research team led by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain decided to inject him with their tiny supply of purified penicillin, extracted by hand. They also used his urine to recycle some of the antibiotic so they could squeeze more use out of the drug. His fever and abscesses quickly began to recede, but after five days, the supply of penicillin ran out, he relapsed, and he died. But he had proven that penicillin worked in the human body, and that got them a step closer to mass production.

Bertha Pappenheim, a 21-year-old from Vienna, was treated by the physician Josef Breuer after the death of her father and became known as “Anna O.” Breuer treated her severe symptoms of paralysis, amnesia, aphasia, and more by having her recount buried memories while in a hypnotic trance, which alleviated her symptoms for a short while. It was Pappenheim who first called the process “the talking cure.” She relapsed when Breuer discontinued his therapy and was subsequently institutionalized. Eventually, she became a prominent social worker and feminist leader. Her case would play a role in the development of psychoanalysis.

Dr. Evan O’Neill Kane, a 60-year-old chief surgeon from Kane, Pennsylvania, set out to prove that you can have major surgery without being put under. With his whole surgical team standing by, he laid himself out on pillows and injected himself with local novocaine. Then he carved open his own abdomen and plucked out his infected appendix. He made a complete recovery. About a decade later, as he entered his 70s, Kane performed another solo act, this time removing a hernia from his own body.

Baby Lewis was five months old when she came down with cholera on Broad Street in London’s Soho district. Her mother washed her soiled diapers in a cesspool adjacent to the public water pump on Broad Street. It is thought that the baby contaminated the water supply and subsequently, hundreds of people were infected within days. A physician named John Snow traced the deaths back to this pump and had the handle removed, although it was already dying down at the time. His map suggested that cholera was transmitted through the water, rather than bad air.

Auguste Deter was a 51-year-old woman admitted to an asylum in Frankfurt suffering from rapidly worsening memory loss, hallucinations, and confusion. The attending psychiatrist, Alois Alzheimer, followed Deter’s case until she died, when he removed and studied pieces of her brain. He discovered severe shrinkage and unusual tangles and plaques, tangible evidence that profound dementia could be caused by specific damage to the brain, and not simply by getting old. Alzheimer’s discovery drew little attention until his mentor, the psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, named it after him.

Antoine Mauroy was a Paris man suffering from severe mental agitation. A royal physician named Jean-Baptiste Denys, who wrongly assumed that gentle animal blood might calm him, transfused Mauroy with calf’s blood. Mauroy reacted violently to the treatment and died after a third transfusion attempt. Denys was brought to trial for murder, but managed to escape conviction when it became evident that Mauroy’s wife had been poisoning her husband with arsenic. Nevertheless, the resulting scandal was enough: France, the Royal Society, and the Catholic Church all subsequently outlawed transfusion of blood into humans for the next 150 or so years.

US Army doctor James Carroll willingly allowed himself to be bitten by a mosquito infected with yellow fever as part of Major Walter Reed’s Yellow Fever Commission in Havana, Cuba. A few days later, he developed high fever and hemorrhaging, demonstrating that the disease was spread by mosquitoes rather than miasma or contaminated clothing. Although he survived the fever, the infection damaged his heart, which is believed to have killed him several years later. His demonstration resulted in efforts to control mosquitoes that ended yellow fever in Havana and facilitated construction of the Panama Canal.

When Alexis St. Martin was an 18-year-old fur trapper, a gun went off in close quarters in a Michigan fort, blasting a hole in his belly. It scarred over in an unusual manner, causing his stomach wall to fuse with the open wound in his side. The Army surgeon who attended him, named William Beaumont, then spent years using the wound as an opening to lower bits of food on strings, suck out gastric juices, and show that digestion was done by stomach acid rather than grinding up the food in the belly. St. Martin always tried to run away to his family in Canada after each session, but he lived to old age.

An 8-year-old girl, whose name is unknown, was admitted to Boston Children’s Hospital suffering from the severe polio strain of paralysis. Her chest wasn’t moving, she was comatose, and barely alive. Harvard engineering professor Philip Drinker and physician Louis Agassiz Shaw put her in their contraption, which would come to be known as the iron lung, and within a minute, as the pump started to move air in and out, the girl was breathing again, her consciousness returning. Five days later, she died from pneumonia, but the device worked.

Louis Victor Leborgne, known to the doctors of the Bicêtre hospital as Tan, after the only sound he could still make, had not been able to form words for some time prior to his death, but could still comprehend what people were saying to him. When he died of gangrene, the French doctor Paul Broca opened his brain and saw evidence of a specific lesion in the left side of the frontal lobe of his brain. This became known as Broca’s area and provided the first concrete evidence that there is a specific part of the brain dedicated to the task of producing speech.

Mary Rafferty, 30 years old, was a domestic servant brought to a Cincinnati hospital with a cancerous ulcer that had eaten through her skull, leaving her brain exposed. The physician Roberts Bartholow decided to use needle electrodes to probe her exposed brain to see which areas corresponded to specific movements. He turned up the current until Mary began to convulse, then slipped into a coma and died days later. The outrage of the leading medical associations led to public apologies by Bartholow and was a step toward limiting dangerous experimentation on human patients.

At 31 years old, Henrietta Lacks, a mother of five, was getting treatment for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and scientist George Gey’s lab took samples from her tumor without asking or informing her. Unlike all previous samples of human cells tried, Lacks’ cells continued to divide without dying off, becoming the first “immortal” human cell line, later known as HeLa. Her cells were used in building the polio vaccine and in decades of cancer and genetic research. Lacks died the same year, without knowing what her cells had already started.

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