The Doctor Who Drank Bacteria to Prove a Point
In 1984 an Australian physician swallowed a flask of Helicobacter pylori to prove that ulcers were caused by bacteria, not stress — and got violently ill on schedule. This is the story of how one man's stomach overturned a century of medical dogma and eventually won a Nobel Prize.
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Medical consensus once wrongly blamed high-strung lifestyles and stomach acid for causing peptic ulcers.
Barry Marshall drank a beef extract broth containing bacteria to prove it caused stomach inflammation.
Animal models like pigs and mice failed to develop the infection during early research trials.
Marshall experienced severe nausea and non-acidic vomiting just three days after his self-experiment began.
A ten-day biopsy confirmed that bacteria had successfully colonized Marshall's previously healthy stomach lining.
Marshall and Warren received the twenty-five Nobel Prize after antibiotics became the standard ulcer treatment.
- 01Intro1 min
- 02The Era of the Ulcer Personality2 min
- 03The Broth and the Baseline3 min
- 04Ten Days of Gastric Turmoil2 min
- 05From Ridicule to the Nobel Stage3 min
- 06Outro1 min
- Barry Marshall - Wikipedia
- Gut Feeling - Lasker Foundation
- The Self-Experimentation of Barry Marshall | ASM.org
- When Scientists Experiment on Themselves: H. pylori and Ulcers
- Q&A: Barry Marshall - Nature
- Helicobacter pylori: A Nobel pursuit? - PMC - NIH
- Barry James Marshall—Discovery of Helicobacter pylori as a Cause of Peptic Ulcer
- Barry J. Marshall - Nobel Lecture
- Professor Barry Marshall, gastroenterologist
- Rethinking the history of peptic ulcer disease and its ... - PMC
- [PDF] From Dyspepsia to Helicobacter: A History of Peptic Ulcer Disease
- Pharmacological Management of Peptic Ulcer - PMC - NIH
- A Review of the History of Peptic Ulcer Disease
- Rethinking the history of peptic ulcer disease and its relevance for network epistemology
- [Psychosomatic disease or infection? Peptic ulcer in the light of the history of ideas and of the philosophy of science] - PubMed
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