5. Medical student infected himself with the disease of a patient and died a few weeks later.
Daniel Alcides Carrion was a Peruvian medical student after whom Carrion’s disease is named. During his school excursions as a student, Carrion met several people with verrucous skin eruptions and caught an interest in the disease that was later named after him. From 1881 he conducted extensive research on “Oroya fever”, including clinical studies at the Dos de Mayo hospital in Lima. Carrion recognized that the disease was endemic, but not contagious. In order to find out whether the disease could be inoculated and to study its clinical course, Carrion decided to conduct an experiment on himself.
On August 27, 1885, Carrion took blood from a 14 year old boy that carried the disease. As Carrion had trouble inoculating himself, friends took the lancet and made four inoculations, two in each of Carrion’s arms. He experienced the first symptoms of the disease on September 17, and by September 26 he was too ill to make his own notes, which were continued by his friends attending him at the bedside. Carrion’s condition rapidly deteriorated and on October 5 he eventually died. Soon after his death from the disease, a fellow student who had assisted in the experiment was arrested for his “murder,” but later released.