Surgery
Topics from the archives of the Mad Science Museum related to surgery. Arranged in descending chronological order.
Electrified Sheep
& Elephants on Acid
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Categories
 Man self-operates on hernia. (July 2011) In an act reminiscent of the self-operating surgeon Evan O'Neill Kane, a California man used a butter knife in an attempt to remove a protruding hernia. Police, responding to a call from his wife, found him sitting outside naked with a six-inch knife lodged in his stomach. Before paramedics arrived, the man pulled out the knife and then stuck a lit cigarette into the wound, apparently to cauterize it. Link: Yahoo! News. via Sally Richards.
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Monkey-Head Transplant (1970)
 When Vladimir Demikhov unveiled his two-headed dogs in 1954, it inspired a strange kind of surgical arms race (or rather, head race) between the two superpowers. Eager to prove that its surgeons were actually the best in the world, the American government began funding the work of Robert White, who then embarked on a series of experimental surgeries, performed at his brain research center in Cleveland, Ohio, resulting in the world's first successful monkey-head transplant. |
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Demikhov’s Two-Headed Dogs (1954-1969)
 In 1954 Vladimir Demikhov shocked the world by unveiling a surgically created monstrosity: A two-headed dog. He created the creature in a lab on the outskirts of Moscow by grafting the head, shoulders, and front legs of a puppy onto the neck of a mature German shepherd. Demikhov paraded the dog before reporters from around the world. Journalists gasped as both heads simultaneously lapped at bowls of milk, and then cringed as the milk from the puppy's head dribbled out the unconnected stump of its esophageal tube. The Soviet Union proudly boasted that the dog was proof of their nation's medical preeminence. |
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The Isolated Head of a Dog (Late 1920s)
 Ever since the carnage of the French Revolution, when the guillotine sent thousands of severed heads tumbling into baskets, scientists had wondered whether it would be possible to keep a head alive apart from its body, but it wasn't until the late 1920s that someone managed to pull off this feat. |
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The Self-Surgery of Dr. Evan O’Neill Kane (1921 & 1932)
 Dr. Evan O'Neill Kane |