Charles Édouard Brown-Séquard, a “small dark man with a smile full of kindness”,1 felt every one of his 72 years. His concentration was on the wane. His physical strength had weakened. He had toilet trouble. So, Brown-Séquard injected himself with the extracts of dogs’ and guinea pigs’ testicles. But Brown-Séquard’s self-experimentation seems restrained, almost mundane, compared with one researcher who wanted to discover how yellow fever spread.
These self-experimenters were not scientific mavericks: they were part of the medical and biological establishment. Brown-Séquard (1817-1894) made landmark discoveries in several areas of biology including the nervous system and hormones.2 And he was a keen self-experimenter.
On one occasion, Brown-Séquard infused his blood into the corpses of guillotined criminals to show that the ‘dead’ tissue was still viable. On another, he wanted to explore the skin’s function. So, he cocooned himself in varnish. His students found Brown-Séquard unconscious and used sandpaper to remove the varnish.
In 1869, Brown-Séquard wondered whether injecting semen (which is rich in several hormones) into the blood of old men would boost theirprestigious Parisian that he’d injected himself subcutaneously (into the fat under the skin) on 10 occasions over three weeks with extracts made from the testicles of dogs and guinea pigs. Brown-Séquard said his concentration, physical strength and endurance, “jet of urine” and “power of defecation” all improved.
