17. Physiologist ate minced raw beef every morning, regurgitated it an hour later, and fed it to his patients.
William Bosworth Castle was a physiologist who played an important role in the emergence of hematology as a scientific discipline in the first half of the 20st century. His contributions were instrumental in establishing the global reputation of the Thorndike Memorial Laboratory and the Harvard Medical Unit at Boston City Hospital. Castle’s early experiments solved the puzzle of pernicious anemia and were the building blocks for a series of experiments on that disease that stand as one of the finest examples of clinical research ever conducted. Castle and his group also made pioneering contributions to hemoglobin physiology, mechanisms of hemolysis, splenic function, and sickle cell anemia.
However, some of his experiments were seen as controversial at the time. In 1926, he started eating minced raw beef every morning, vomiting it an hour later, and then fed it to his patients suffering from pernicious anemia. Castle was testing his theory that there was an intrinsic factor produced in a normal stomach that hugely increased the uptake of the extrinsic factor (now identified as vitamin B12), the lack of which leads to pernicious anemia. Beef is a good source of B12, but patients did not respond with beef alone. Castle reasoned they lacked production of this intrinsic factor and he could provide it from his own stomach. Disgusting or not, these were some groundbreaking results.