We’ve found evidence of surgery performed on people as far back as 12,000 years ago. These procedures indicate our ancient ancestors performed surgical trepanation which involved drilling a hole through the skull to expose the brain. So it was clearly something that would have taken a deft hand if the patient was to live.
Today, about 310 million surgeries are performed every year. We’ve come a long way. But despite our progress, some surgeries seem to skirt the rules and procedures of what we’d consider safe, especially when they’re procedures that people perform on themselves.
10. Werner Forssmann
If you haven’t heard of Werner Forssmann, it’s likely only because he was born in 1904 and he’s before your time. His contributions to medical science were so significant he won the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1956. This all stems from his research into heart catheterization, a procedure that is used to treat and diagnose numerous heart conditions to this day.
Forssman believed if you inserted a catheter into an arm vein, you could feed it into a patient’s heart. That’s reasonable today but, when he came up with it in 1929, the medical establishment thought he was either an idiot or insane. So, to prove his point, he had to do it to himself. To be clear, he had been expressly forbidden from doing this. So he sneaked behind the backs of his bosses and got only one other person on board – operating room nurse Gerda Ditzen. Without her help, he couldn’t even access the tools to perform the procedure.
Forssmann convinced Ditzen that his procedure was sound. He convinced her so well that she volunteered to be his patient. So he strapped her to the operating room table with restraints and then pulled the old switcheroo, doing it to himself when she was restrained and unable to stop him.
He managed to fight off another doctor from pulling the catheter out of his arm and then x-rayed himself to prove it worked. He then performed the procedure on a terminally ill patient, published the results, and was promptly fired from the hospital where he worked for breaking the rules.
9. Leonid Rogozov Performed His Own Antarctic Appendectomy
Most of us will never go to Antarctica and for good reason. In 2021, the average temperature between April and September was -61 Celsius, which works out to -78 Fahrenheit. That’s basically death in temperature form. Antifreeze will even freeze before it gets that cold. So when people do go to the South Pole, it’s usually at a research base for an extended period of time with only a small number of colleagues and no chance of contact with the outside world in any sort of a timely manner.
Back in 1961, Leonid Rogozov was the only doctor on staff at the Antarctic Novolazarevskaya Station. In April, Rogozov was feeling extremely ill and the ship to take them back to Russia wasn’t arriving for a year. As it was, the journey had taken 36 days, and he needed immediate help. He needed to have his appendix removed, and he was the only man qualified to do it.
Rogozov had two choices. He could die or he could perform the surgery himself. He had some of his colleagues work as nurses and one was tasked with holding a mirror so he could see what he was doing. He had a local anesthetic to numb the skin of his stomach, but once he got inside, he’d have to wing it with no painkillers at all.
The mirror proved too hard to maneuver, so he did the surgery blind letting his sense of touch guide him. He nearly passed out several times, but after two entire hours of working in his own gut he had the organ, which was a day away from bursting, removed. Two weeks later, he was back at work.
8. Ines Ramirez Performed Her Own C-Section
If you’re interested in just how tough a mother can be, look no further than Ines Ramirez. At age forty, Ramirez already had six children and had lost a seventh at birth a few years earlier. She liked some 80km away from the nearest town in a very rural part of Mexico on a farm. Her home had no phone and her husband was away at a cantina. It was only Ramirez and her children at home.
Feeling a familiar pain in her abdomen over the course of 12 hours, Ramirez knew something was wrong with the baby and if she didn’t get help, she risked losing the child as she had lost her previous one. But there was no way to contact help. So she took matters into her own hands.
Ramirez took a few hits from a bottle of alcohol and grabbed a knife from the kitchen. She had experience butchering animals, but no medical knowledge. Despite that, she managed to make precise incisions that prevented her from wounding the baby or any internal organs. She removed the baby, cut the umbilical cord with scissors, and passed out.
Ramirez’s six-year-old son ran to town and came back with help. The health worker who came back sewed Ramirez up with a regular needle and thread. Doctors who examined her after the fact were convinced that the story happened as Ramirez relayed it and were impressed by the work she did .
7. Boston Corbett Killed John Wilkes Booth and Also Castrated Himself
In 1865, after John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln, he fled on horseback. The military was enlisted to track the killer, and the 16th New York Cavalry Regiment was the regiment that tracked him down. They located him in a barn where Boston Corbett fired a shot from his revolver, taking Wilkes in the neck.
Though this was Corbett’s main claim to fame, the man led an interesting and curious life. He also vanished and was never seen again after 1894. But during his life, his eccentricities manifest most noticeably in the surgery he performed on himself. In 1858, he castrated himself in an effort to curb his desire for prostitutes. Rather than seeking medical attention, he went to dinner after the act.
In later years, historians have come to believe that Corbett, who had spent time working as a hatter, had absorbed many toxic chemicals that had affected his mental state.
6. Doctor Repairs His Own Torn Ligament
In Cincinnati, Dr. Mohab Foad had spent years performing surgery on people’s hands. He works on upwards of a dozen hands per day and had done so for over a decade. If you want an expert on hand surgery, he’s your man. And for that reason, it seems almost too obvious that, when he needed surgery on his own hand, he was the one to perform it.
After injuring himself playing paintball, Foad realized he’d torn some ligaments. Though he did get an assist from a colleague at the behest of his wife, he handled a good portion of the operation on his own and got some insight into exactly what his patients go through.
5. Aussie Removed His Own Cyst After Waiting 2 Years
Tom Petty once sang that the waiting is the hardest part, but the electrician from Australia who removed his own cyst after waiting two years might have a different opinion. He used a common utility knife to excise the grape-sized cyst from his own hand.
Wait times are supposed to be limited to a single year, and the cyst was affecting the man’s work. After two years, he couldn’t handle the wait anymore, so he heated the knife up, cut the cyst out, drained the goo from inside, disinfected the wound and popped a bandaid on it.
Doctors pointed out how lucky he was that he didn’t make anything worse while admitting that yes, wait times can get egregious.
4. Woman Tried Her Own Breast Augmentation
It’s hard to say there’s ever a good time to perform surgery on yourself. Sometimes it’s obviously done out of necessity and sometimes it was done simply because a surgeon had the skill to do so. But when an everyday person tries to perform a surgery, it can be a sign that there’s a much larger issue related to mental health or just a terrible lack of understanding related to potential consequences.
In 2014, a woman from Argentina attempted to perform a breast augmentation on herself. She did this by injecting Vaseline into her own chest. The procedure had complications soon after and she began having breathing problems. She denied having any idea what happened at first, not telling doctors what she’d done. Later she admitted it, but by then it was too late. She suffered a fatal blood clot.
3. Butter Knife Hernia Surgery
Contrary to what a lot of people believe, wait times for surgery in the United States are often much longer than they are in countries with universal healthcare. People can wait two, three, four months and more depending on how necessary the surgery is. Things like hernia surgery can have you waiting quite a while.
In 2011, a man in California opted to take care of his own hernia surgery. Whether it was due to an issue with wait times, money, or even mental illness isn’t really known. But what is known is that he tried to do it with a butter knife. When emergency crews arrived, the knife was sticking out of the man’s abdomen. He took it out and shoved the cigarette he was smoking into the wound, potentially to cauterize it, or just to look like an ’80s action star.
2. Tatsuya Ichihashi Performed Plastic Surgery To Evade Police
Nearly every self-surgery you’ll hear about is done out of medical necessity. Tatsuya Ichihashi performed his surgery to escape prosecution for murder. He changed the way he looked by using scissors to cut down the size of his lips, a box cutter to remove moles, and used thread to sew up his nose in an attempt to make it look smaller.
At some point he went to a real plastic surgeon to get a nose job since his own efforts did little, but the surgeon later remarked his appearance barely changed anyway.
Ichihashi was on the run in Japan after the 2007 murder of Lindsay Hawker. It was over two years later when he was finally captured.
1. Evan O’Neill Kane Performed 3 Surgeries on Himself
Dr. Evan O’Neill Kane was a quirky guy in part because of circumstance and in part because of general weirdness. For instance, he once suggested mothers and newborn babies get matching tattoos so the babies wouldn’t get lost. He also tattooed his patients with India ink after performing surgeries with his initial in Morse code.
One patient he never tattooed was himself, not for lack of chances. He performed three surgeries on himself over the years. His first was an amputation after his finger got badly infected. He didn’t believe general anesthesia was necessary for surgery.
Two years after the finger, Kane needed to remove his own appendix. Again, he just used local anesthesia for the procedure. He didn’t need to do it himself; there was another surgeon in the room who closed him up after. He just wanted to.
Years later, in his seventies, Kane also performed a hernia operation on himself. The operation was a success but he died several months later.