The Craziest Doctor Ever Who Drank Patients' Vomits To Prove His Theory: Stubbins Ffirth
Not all doctors use their knowledge to serve the evil, like the Japanese one we saw earlier. This one tried to go down the rabbit hole and tried the most awkward and disgusting experiments to prove that yellow fever was not an infectious disease. Stubbins Ffirth ( 1784 - 1820 ), is probably one of the craziest doctors who did such things to prove his point. Here is his story:
Ffirth, an American general practitioner, lived in the late 18th century when the yellow fever epidemic was on the rise.
The epidemic particularly affected the state of Pennsylvania, caused the deaths of 10% of the population. In this period, it is worth noting that the city of Philadelphia had a population of 50,000 people.
Ffirth began working on the disease at the University of Pennsylvania a few years after the rise of the yellow fever epidemic.
Ffirth's claim was that the disease, which rose in the summer months and stood in relative terms during the winter months, was not contagious. According to him, the disease was thought to be contagious because of the summer heat that caused stress on people. The doctor explained that the disease was less observed during the winter season with this claim.
The patient he was going to use to prove Ffirth's claim was none other than himself.
Ffirth, who wanted to prove that yellow fever was not an infectious disease, soon began experimenting. He made all of his experiments between 1802 and1803 when the second yellow fever outbreak happened. The doctor needed the bodily fluid of the affected people to reach his goal.
The doctor, who kept the search for a while, provided the materials he needed from the people who were in the last stages of the illness.
In his first experiments, Ffirth opened wounds in his arms and tried to infect the open wound with the patients' vomits. When he saw that he wasn't affected, in his second step, he poured the vomit into his eyes to see the effects it would cause.
As a result of this experiment, the doctor, who didn't get infected, tried different and more disgusting experiments.
The next step was to boil the patients' vomit and smell it, and then he drank the vomit of the patients. Ffirth, unaffected by all of these and without any health problems, believed that he proved the disease was not infectious.
After proving his claim with vomit, Ffirth then began to work with other bodily fluids.
Again nothing happened to the doctor whose open wounds were in contact with the urine, saliva, and blood of the infected patients. For this reason, he declared that yellow fever was not an infectious disease.
However, despite all the disgusting experiments he had done, the findings of Ffirth were totally wrong.
Because yellow fever was actually a contagious disease and people were infected through mosquito bites. The reason why the outbreaks were seen in the summer months was this. It was Cuban scientist Carlos Finlay who would prove this 60 years after Ffirth's death. The reason Ffirth was unable to infect himself with the disease was that he used the body fluids of people who could not pass on the disease because they were in the last stage. It's another question whether it's good or bad that he couldn't prove it.
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