Bottom ten percent
In 1983 two doctors in Perth, Australia sent a paper to the Gastroenterological Society of Australia. It said stomach ulcers were caused by a bacterium. The reviewers turned it down and ranked it in the bottom ten percent of everything they read that year.
The idea was not merely wrong to them. It was absurd. The stomach is acid. Nothing lives in acid.
Barry Marshall was a registrar at Royal Perth Hospital. Robin Warren was a pathologist who kept finding spiral bacteria in stomach biopsies. In 1982 they cultured one and named it Helicobacter pylori. When they tried to infect piglets with it, nothing happened.
So in 1984 Marshall did the thing that made him famous and that would not clear an ethics board today. He had a baseline endoscopy so there would be a before picture. Then he drank a broth of the bacteria.
Three days later: nausea, and bad breath strong enough that his wife noticed. By day five he was vomiting. On day eight they put a scope back down his throat and found his stomach wall massively inflamed. A biopsy grew H. pylori back out of him. He had colonized himself on purpose, and the before and after were now the same man.
On day fourteen he started antibiotics and got better.
The experiment was published in 1985. It is one of the most cited papers in the history of the Medical Journal of Australia.
Years later, in 1998, he said: “Everyone was against me, but I knew I was right.”
Be careful with that line. Marshall was not alone. Warren was with him from the start, and they shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for it. Some argue the field's doubt was ordinary scientific caution, not cruelty. A new claim about ulcers, of all things, deserves a hard look.
But there is a difference between arguing your case and making your body the evidence. He could not get the world to believe a story about a stomach, so he turned his own stomach into the demonstration. That is the part that stayed with me.
For most of a century the standard story was stress, spicy food, too much acid, and the treatment was bland meals and a lifetime of antacids. Now a short course of antibiotics cures most of it.
The paper came back rated bottom ten percent. The man in it is fine.
Barry J Marshall, photo by WikiEdtingProfile2021, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.