Beyond the call of duty | 6 March 2010

When school-children are asked to draw a scientist, says Trevor Nelson, nine out of ten of them draw a mad scientist. My first thought on reading this was: why is there no photograph of Nelson on the dustcover of this book? Might he look particularly bonkers? After seconds of exhaustive research I found a picture of him on the internet, and he looks rather a jolly old soul. Professor of Marine Biology at Liverpool until his retirement, Nelson has since written a couple of quirky memoirs and a not wholly unquirky history of diving. This new book is subtitled ‘A witty celebration of the great eccentrics who have performed dangerous acts of self-experimentation’. He has not come to bury the mad scientist archetype, he has come to praise him.

His research has been intensive and his material is rich and plentiful. He starts with John Hunter, the Scottish farmer’s son who changed surgery from a trade into a science. Hunter became fascinated with venereal diseases, probably because so many of his patients had them. (James Boswell ‘had 19 or more bouts of gonorrhoea without learning his lesson’.) Hunter believed that gonorrhoea and syphilis couldn’t occupy one body at the same time, so must be different phases of the same disease.

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On whom could he test this radical (and wholly incorrect) hypothesis? You’ve guessed it. So Hunter cut incisions in his own penis and inserted someone else’s gonorrhoeic discharges into it.

Unfortunately Hunter had also given himself syphilis, and took mercury to cure himself, which made him equally, but differently, ill. This is all in chapter one, by the way. There is much more to come.

Surgeons, of course, needed analgesics for their patients, but there weren’t any. A Japanese surgeon spent 20 years testing different combinations of plant extracts on animals, seeking one that dulled pain without dangerous side effects.