The Doctor Who Drank a Petri Dish

In June 1984, Barry Marshall was a 32-year-old internal medicine resident in Perth, Western Australia, with an unpopular hypothesis: stomach ulcers were caused by a bacterium, not stress or spicy food. He and pathologist Robin Warren had been culturing curved bacilli from the stomachs of ulcer patients and reporting it to deeply unimpressed gastroenterologists. The reigning theory was that the stomach was sterile — too acidic for anything to live in — so an ulcer was, by definition, a problem of acid and the nervous system. The standard treatment was H2 blockers and a calmer life.

Marshall tried to satisfy Koch's postulates by infecting piglets. The piglets, infuriatingly, would not get gastritis. So one morning he had a baseline endoscopy to confirm his stomach was clean, swirled a Petri-dish broth of the bacteria into a glass of beef extract, and drank it.

For three days, nothing. On day five, his wife told him his breath smelled bad. He started vomiting clear watery liquid each morning before eating. On day eight, a second endoscopy showed severe active gastritis with the curved bacteria packed across his stomach lining. He had given himself a textbook case of the disease he had been arguing existed. He took bismuth and an antibiotic and recovered.

The paper Marshall and Warren had submitted that May, "Unidentified curved bacilli in the stomach of patients with gastritis and peptic ulceration," came out in The Lancet on June 16, 1984. The bacterium was renamed Helicobacter pylori in 1989. The NIH consensus statement endorsing antibiotic treatment for ulcers came in 1994. Marshall and Warren shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Most peptic ulcers are now cured in two weeks with a course of antibiotics.