Smoking Ears and Screaming Teeth : A Celebration of Scientific Eccentricity and Self-Experimentation by Trevor Norton

Manyscientists have followed the advice of the great Victorian doctor Jack Haldane to never experiment on an animal if a man will do and never ask anyone to do anything you wouldn t do yourself. He and his father inhaled poisonous gasses to test the efficacy of the prototype gas mask they had invented. When breathing gasses under pressure he suffered the smoking ears and screaming teeth of the title.Thestories in Norton s new book are astonishing, disturbing or absurd. Thezoologist Frank Buckland made a concentrated effort to widen the nation s diet by personally testing everything that crossed his path, from boiled elephant s trunk to slug soup. Some medics deliberately contracted deadly blood diseases in the hope of finding cures. Then there was the surgeon who was fired and subsequently won the Nobel Prizefor thrusting a catheter into his own beating heart.