The Doctor Who Drank the Diagnosis

In 1984, an Australian physician named Barry Marshall was certain he had discovered the true cause of most stomach ulcers — not stress or spicy food, as the entire medical establishment insisted, but a corkscrew-shaped bacterium called Helicobacter pylori. The problem was that no one believed him.

Journals rejected his papers. Senior colleagues dismissed his findings. The pharmaceutical industry, built on profitable antacid sales, had little appetite for a cheap antibiotic cure. Marshall and his research partner Robin Warren had the evidence. They simply couldn't get anyone to listen.

So Marshall did something remarkable. He drank a petri dish full of live H. pylori bacteria.

Within days he developed gastritis — the painful stomach inflammation that precedes ulcers. He treated himself with antibiotics. He recovered. He documented everything and published. Twenty-one years later, in 2005, he and Warren stood in Stockholm and accepted the Nobel Prize in Medicine.