Feb 1, 2021 04:17 PM
https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-me...-his-anus/
EXCERPTS: . . . Then, there's Dr Nicholas Senn, an absolute hero who focussed on chugging from the opposite end, so to speak. Let's not beat about the bush, he pumped a large amount of hydrogen gas into his anus all in the name of medicine.
Senn was an American surgeon who served in the Spanish-American War of 1898. At the time, when X-rays were not widespread, bullet wounds to the abdomen where the intestines or stomach were perforated were incredibly difficult to diagnose and locate. [...] Senn had seen far too many deaths of this type when he came up with a plan: he would begin to inflate the mortally wounded like a balloon. "It occurred to him that a wound in the stomach or intestine should be sought for in some such way as a plumber locates a leak in a gas pipe," a paper on the topic says.
[...] Previous experiments had shown that pumping water up there was a bad idea ... Senn opted to use hydrogen, figuring it wasn't an irritant on tissues and could be detected quite easily by setting it alight. As a bonus, any fire would merely cauterize the wound.
He first tried it on some poor unsuspecting dogs [...] As part of a series of experiments on real human patients to prove its effectiveness and safety, and partly because he was a bit curious about what it felt like, Senn inflated himself.
[...] "When the intestines and the stomach had become fully distended the feeling of distention was distressing ... A great deal of the gas escaped by eructation, which was followed by great relief..."
In essence, it was safe and felt like colic, and was relieved by farting out hydrogen. [...] The first patient with a gunshot wound he tried it on – a 27-year-old man who had been shot with a pistol – did not survive. However, it did prove to be a useful tool in locating wounds, saving many, many lives before X-ray technology became widespread, meaning that the wounded no longer had to be inflated via the rectum... (MORE - details)
EXCERPTS: . . . Then, there's Dr Nicholas Senn, an absolute hero who focussed on chugging from the opposite end, so to speak. Let's not beat about the bush, he pumped a large amount of hydrogen gas into his anus all in the name of medicine.
Senn was an American surgeon who served in the Spanish-American War of 1898. At the time, when X-rays were not widespread, bullet wounds to the abdomen where the intestines or stomach were perforated were incredibly difficult to diagnose and locate. [...] Senn had seen far too many deaths of this type when he came up with a plan: he would begin to inflate the mortally wounded like a balloon. "It occurred to him that a wound in the stomach or intestine should be sought for in some such way as a plumber locates a leak in a gas pipe," a paper on the topic says.
[...] Previous experiments had shown that pumping water up there was a bad idea ... Senn opted to use hydrogen, figuring it wasn't an irritant on tissues and could be detected quite easily by setting it alight. As a bonus, any fire would merely cauterize the wound.
He first tried it on some poor unsuspecting dogs [...] As part of a series of experiments on real human patients to prove its effectiveness and safety, and partly because he was a bit curious about what it felt like, Senn inflated himself.
[...] "When the intestines and the stomach had become fully distended the feeling of distention was distressing ... A great deal of the gas escaped by eructation, which was followed by great relief..."
In essence, it was safe and felt like colic, and was relieved by farting out hydrogen. [...] The first patient with a gunshot wound he tried it on – a 27-year-old man who had been shot with a pistol – did not survive. However, it did prove to be a useful tool in locating wounds, saving many, many lives before X-ray technology became widespread, meaning that the wounded no longer had to be inflated via the rectum... (MORE - details)
