I’m probably walking a thin line here. I want to know about experiments that were odd and perhaps a little unsettling, but not of a kind to make you despair of the race. Think Poe, not war crimes tribunal.
This is a good example :
In the Paris Journal of Anatomy and Physiology of 1869 there was reported by Robin an experiment on the body of a criminal whose head had been removed an hour previously at the level of the fourth cervical vertebra. The skin around the nipple was scratched with the point of a scalpel. Immediately there ensued a series of rapid movements in the upper extremity which had been extended on the table. The hand was brought across the chest to the pit of the stomach simultaneously with the semiflexion of the fore arm and inward rotation of the arm, a movement of defence as it were.
This is from the journal Nature , volume 64, dated September 5, 1901. It is, in short, pure Victor von Frankenstein stuff, and needs only the proper musical accompaniment to complete the scene.
Does anyone have anything better?
In 1928, John Logie Baird experimented with a cadaver eye as part of a television scanner apparatus.
As soon as I was given the eye, I hurried in a taxicab to the laboratory. Within a few minutes I had the eye in the machine. Then I turned on the current and the waves carrying television were broadcast from the aerial. The essential image for television passed through the eye within half and hour after the operation. On the following day the sensitiveness of the eye’s visual nerve was gone. The optic was dead. I had been dissatisfied with the old-fashioned selenium cell and lens. I felt that television demanded something more refined. The most sensitive optical substance known is the nerve of the human eye… I had to wait a long time to get the eye because unimpaired ones are not often removed by surgeons… Nothing was gained from the experiment. It was gruesome and a waste of time.
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Kobal2
November 1, 2010, 10:07am
3
The living severed dog head probably fits.
A thousand U.S. scientists in Manhattan last week saw dead animals brought back to life. It was the first public U.S. showing of a film picturing an experiment by Soviet biologists. They drained the blood from a dog. Fifteen minutes after its heart had stopped beating, they pumped the blood back into its lifeless body with a machine called an autojector, serving as artificial heart and lungs. Soon the dog stirred, began to breathe; its heart began to beat. In twelve hours it was on its feet, wagging its tail, barking, fully recovered.
The autojector, a relatively simple machine, has a vessel (the “lung”) in which blood is supplied with oxygen, a pump that circulates the oxygenated blood through the arteries, another pump that takes blood from the veins back to the “lung” for more oxygen. Two other dogs on whom the experiment was performed in 1939 are still alive and healthy. The autojector can also keep a dog’s heart beating outside its body, has kept a decapitated dog’s head alive for hours—the head cocked its ears at a noise and licked its chops when citric acid was smeared on them. But the machine is incapable of reviving a whole dog more than about 15 minutes after its blood is drained—body cells then begin to disintegrate.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,851883,00.html#ixzz141XomKSK
I saw a clip of this thing and it remains one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen on the internet, which is really saying something.
Whoa! Thin line crossed! Thin line crossed!:D:eek:
Dr. William Beaumont , who conducted research into the digestive process by tying food to a string and dipping it into the stomach fistula of a patient who had suffered a musket wound.
zoid
November 1, 2010, 4:38pm
7
Kevbo
November 1, 2010, 5:26pm
8
Not an intentional experiment, but grotesque none the less:
http://www.miketheheadlesschicken.org/index.php
There was a BBC show on mike, it contained a brief interview with my Uncle Harold “doc” Llloyd.
Derleth
November 1, 2010, 10:00pm
9
I’d heard about the lazarus dogs, the stomach hole experiment, and Mike the Headless Chicken, but the eye television and the dinoflies were new to me. Great finds!
Kobal2
November 2, 2010, 2:10am
10
I remember that one from high school school biology. I was 13 IIRC. No, we didn’t re-do the experiment
Back then, of course, it was AWESOME
but still, in retrospect, that’s kind of a sick material to teach kids.