13 People Who Operated on Themselves

“If you want something done right, do it yourself” is an old adage that doesn’t seem like it would apply to major surgery. For a handful of people, however, the notion of cutting themselves open to relieve a condition seemed like a good idea ... or their only option. Take a look at some of history’s auto-surgical pioneers.

1. Leonid Rogozov

In April 1961, Leonid Rogozov found himself in a bit of a pickle. The 27-year-old surgeon was part of a Soviet expedition to Antarctica when he got sick with what he eventually realized was appendicitis. There were no other doctors on the expedition. The weather made flying anywhere impossible, not to mention the fact that travel back to Russia by sea took almost 40 days. 

So Rogozov—who wrote in his journal that the pain felt like “A snowstorm whipping through my soul, wailing like a hundred jackals”—decided that the only option he had if he wanted to live was to take a scalpel to himself.

What do you do if you’re stuck in Antarctica and you need to operate on yourself? Rogozov first got the necessary permission all the way from Moscow, then enlisted three of his colleagues to be his assistants during the surgery. They would hand him the instruments he needed and hold a mirror so he could see what he was doing. He instructed them to inject him with adrenaline if he passed out and even told them to perform artificial ventilation if necessary. Then he injected novocaine into his abdomen and got to work—he  later wrote that although he was terrified, “somehow I automatically switched into operating mode, and from that point on I didn’t notice anything else.”  

The surgery was not easy—Rogozov had to discard the mirror and work by touch—but the surgeon did eventually reach his appendix, remove it, and stitch himself up in around two hours. Good thing, too; after looking at the organ, he estimated it would have burst within a day.  Rogozov went back to work two weeks later.

Some countries, like Australia, have since mandated that physicians headed for the Antarctic have their appendix removed via elective surgery before traveling there.

2. Robert Kerr McLaren

Rogozov isn’t the only person to have taken out their own appendix. There’s also the Australian veterinary surgeon Robert Kerr McLaren, who removed the organ in a jungle in the Philippines sans anesthesia in the 1940s, and Dr. Evan Kane, who we’ll get to later in this list.

3. Gouverneur Morris

You might not know Gouverneur Morris’s name, but you’ve probably read his work: He tweaked some of the language of the Constitution, earning himself the moniker “The Penman of the Constitution.” He was also a U.S. senator and a one-time minister to France, and has the dubious distinction of being the only Founding Father to stick whalebone in his penis (at least that we know about).

Here’s what happened: In 1816, Morris’s health was on the decline. In addition to having a raging case of gout, he was also having trouble urinating, possibly due to a urinary tract infection. He was unable to pee and was, understandably, probably freaking out. So he decided to grab a piece of whalebone that may have come from his wife’s corset and stick it up there in an attempt to clear the blockage. He had maybe done it once before with a piece of flexible hickory, and it had worked like a charm—so he likely had reasonable confidence that this, too, would be successful.

It wasn’t. Morris ended up with a penile infection and died on November 6, 1816.

4. Aron Ralston

In 2003, 27-year-old climber Aron Ralston was exploring a canyon in Utah when a boulder dislodged itself and trapped his right arm to the wall. With no phone reception—and no phone—and precious little to eat or drink, he decided to take the matter into his one free hand and slowly sever his trapped arm using a pocket knife. He was forced to bend and break his bones to complete the job; decomposition gases hissed from his wounds as he sliced.

“The detachment had already happened in my mind,” he told The Guardian in 2010. “It's rubbish, it's going to kill you, get rid of it Aron. It's an ‘it.’ It’s no longer my arm. As I picked up the knife, I was very cool and collected.”

Once the arm was cut, Ralston used his climbing gear as a tourniquet and climbed the 65 feet up and out of the canyon.

The harrowing experience, which Ralston survived, became the subject of the 2010 movie 127 Hours, named for the amount of time Ralston was stuck under the boulder before he managed to free himself.

5. Charles-Auguste Clever de Maldigny

Bladder stones are horrifically painful, and just a few hundred years ago, the surgery to remove them sounds like a whole other form of torture: Surgeons would stick a finger in the patient’s rectum to locate the bladder, then go through the perineum—you know, that stretch between the genitals and the anus—to make a small incision in the organ. Next they’d use forceps or something called a “scoop extractor” to remove the stones. After that they’d apparently just … let the wounds heal all on their own. No sewing anything up.

The procedure, known as a lithotomy, was notorious for its high mortality rate. And rather than sit for another horrific operation, surgeon Charles-Auguste Clever de Maldigny—who’d had many rounds of bladder stones before—opted to relieve his agony himself.

With the help of a mirror, he sliced into his bladder and pulled out a stone that had apparently formed around a surgical sponge left in during one of the previous operations. And he didn’t die! But he also didn’t get rid of his bladder stones forever: When they returned years later, de Maldigny opted to have someone else remove them using a new, and less invasive, procedure called a “lithotrity.”

6. Kurtis Kaser

While working on his farm near Pender, Nebraska, in 2019, 63-year-old Kurtis Kaser accidentally got his leg caught in a grain auger. The device began to consume his left foot and threatened to mutilate more of him if he didn’t act quickly. Kaser used his pocket knife to cut off the remains of his leg, then crawled on his elbows for hundreds of feet to get to a phone. At the hospital, the staff performed a “clean” amputation between his knee and ankle. Kaser used the ensuing press attention to remind people to “take time and think” when in a precarious situation.

7. Inés Ramírez Pérez

You probably don’t need anyone to tell you that moms are amazing, but Inés Ramírez Perez took it to a whole new level. The 40-year-old was at home at a remote location in southern Mexico in March 2000 when she went into labor. The nearest clinic was over 50 miles away, and she had no way to get there. The labor was difficult and Perez had previously had a stillbirth—so after 12 hours with no baby, she took some shots of hard liquor, and used a 6-inch knife to cut the baby out. They both survived. 

There were reportedly no witnesses to the actual surgery, but one of the doctors who examined Perez 12 hours after the birth said that “it was evident this surgery was not done by anyone with medical knowledge. There is no doctor or healer in the village, and it is highly doubtful that anyone would have been able to do this to her. If they had, it is such a small town, the word would have spread quickly, and we would have known.” Perez is believed to be the only woman to have ever successfully given herself a C-section. 

8. Amanda Feilding

In 1970, UK native Amanda Feilding—who was interested in how to access deeper parts of her consciousness—decided to drill a hole in her own skull, a practice known as trepanation. It’s one of the world’s oldest known surgeries and dates back at least 7000 years. Feilding thought that doing so would potentially increase blood circulation to her brain, though there was a lack of evidence for this. 

Feilding used a dental drill to bore a hole in her forehead as blood spurted from the wound—and she recorded the whole thing. When the footage was screened at Suydam Gallery in New York in 1978, it caused some audience members to faint. 

“It’s not a difficult operation,” she would later say, adding, “Drilling a hole in one’s head is really a nerve battle, doing something which obviously e­very instinct in your body is against. In a sense it’s quite satisfying that one can overcome one’s nerves to do it.” Feilding would later undergo trepanation a second time, albeit with someone else doing the drilling.

9. Peter Freuchen

Legendary Danish explorer Peter Freuchen was made of tough stuff: In the 1920s, he returned to an Arctic base from out on the tundra, where he had survived an intense snow storm. His left foot was in bad shape. Gangrene began to develop; Freuchen wrote that “the flesh fell away until the bones protruded.” 

There were no doctors on site, but Freuchen was attended to by an Indigenous woman who said she had experience with frozen limbs. He would later write that “When a man is sick and cold and lonely he gets strange ideas, and one day I told the nurse that I wanted to have those toes off.” She agreed that that was best, and volunteered to bite his toes off at the joint, which, Freuchen explained, would “prevent the ghosts from occupying my body” because “her mouth would close the wounds immediately.” He thanked her, but went with his own toe removal method instead: He put a nail puller over each toe and, in his words, “banged it off with a hammer.”

He would eventually lose his whole leg after this incident, but that didn’t slow him down at all: Freuchen was part of the Danish resistance movement against the Nazis and aided Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. When he was captured by the Nazis and sentenced to death, he escaped. He starred in a movie and won the game show The $64,000 Question. And he also claimed to have once made a tool out of his own frozen poop to chisel his way out of an ice pit—yet another example of desperate times calling for desperate measures.

10. Mohab Foad

While many cases of self-surgery arise out of urgency, Ohio surgeon Mohab Foad opted to operate on his own hand merely out of curiosity. He arrived for the scheduled surgery to repair a torn ligament in August 2021, but once he was injected with a local anesthetic, he began feeling like his numbed appendage was almost disconnected from the rest of his body. He later told The Cincinnati Enquirer that “It really was a lot like it wasn’t my thumb, it was anybody else’s” and decided to just request a scalpel and operate on himself. Foad then exchanged surgical steps with a colleague before being sutured up.

11. Viktor Yazykov

In 1998, Viktor Yazykov was competing in a solo sailing contest that tasks contestants with traveling 27,000 miles around the world in nine months. That’s plenty challenging on its own, but then emergency struck. In the middle of the South Atlantic, Yazykov injured his right elbow and grew concerned when it began showing signs of serious infection. When it didn’t resolve, Yazykov reached out via email to Boston surgeon Daniel Carlin, who was on call as the race’s doctor.

Yazykov told Carlin his arm felt “dead” and “like a pillow with some liquid inside.” Carlin emailed him step-by-step instructions on how to puncture and drain the abscess, though he couldn’t take him through it in real-time—the sun had gone down when Yazykov began the procedure, cutting off access to his solar-powered communication equipment. With the emergency tools provided to each competitor by the World Clinic (two scalpels, gloves, iodine, a scrub, and cotton gauze) he got to work.

It turned out that puncturing the abscess wasn’t the issue; the real danger came from the fact that Yazykov experienced heavy bleeding, partly due to some aspirin he had taken that thinned his blood. He made a tourniquet from bungee cords to stop the bleeding at one point, but that could have potentially made matters worse: If the communications didn’t go offline, Carlin would have told him the tourniquet was just going to cut the blood supply off to his arm completely and cause him to lose it.

When the communication was back up, Carlin instructed him to instead apply direct pressure to the wound to help stop the bleeding. Yazykov wound up recovering and continued on with the race. It may have helped that Yazykov was once a Russian Special Forces commando and prone to keeping his cool in tense situations.

11. Evan O’Neill Kane

Operating on yourself feels like an experience you wouldn’t want to repeat, but that wasn’t the case for Dr. Evan O'Neill Kane, a Pennsylvania-based surgeon who, in 1919, amputated his own finger. Then, in 1921, he decided to do a self-surgery for science: Kane was wary of general asthesia, so he tested whether or not local anesthetic would work by giving himself an appendectomy. (And he actually needed it—Kane suffered from chronic appendicitis.) 

After the surgery, he told The New York Times, “I now know exactly how the patient feels when being operated upon under local treatment, and that was one of the objects I had in mind when I determined to perform the operation myself.” About a decade later, the 70-year-old surgeon operated on his own hernia caused by taking a tumble from a horse. 

12. M. Alexandre Fzaicou

Kane wasn’t the only doctor to operate on his own hernia, or even the first—in 1909, 26-year-old Romanian surgeon M. Alexandre Fzaicou removed a hen’s-egg-sized inguinal hernia, which Medical News Today describes as a condition “in which some of the contents of the abdominal cavity push through a weak spot in the wall of the abdomen and form a painful swelling in the groin area.” Yeowch! It took Fzaicou a few times to get the right injection spot, but once he did and the drugs kicked in, he sat upright and cut into himself, ultimately performing an hour-long surgery. Twelve days later he was back at work. 

13. Werner Theodor Otto Forssmann

Finally, let’s head to Germany in 1929, where Dr. Werner Theodor Otto Forssmann had developed an experimental plan to catheterize the heart for operations like repairing mitral valve defects. He submitted it to his hospital’s chief of surgery, who refused to allow any patients to undergo the procedure. When Forssmann offered himself as the patient, the chief refused again; undaunted, Forssmann enlisted a nurse, who volunteered to act as the patient. But when they got in the operating room, Forssmann merely pantomimed performing the surgery on her and actually catheterized himself. Classic bait and switch! Afterward, he apparently walked out to the X-ray department to see if he’d reached his heart (he hadn’t, and needed to insert the catheter a little further). He would later win the the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for 1956 alongside André Frédéric Cournand and Dickinson W. Richards.

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