The Surgeon Who Removed His Own Appendix

On February 15, 1921, Dr. Evan O’Neill Kane decided to test a theory. At the time, people with heart conditions and other serious ailments could not undergo most basic surgeries because general anesthesia was considered too dangerous. Rather than knocking these patients out, Kane wondered if he could simply give them a local anesthetic.

There was only one way to be sure: Kane decided to give himself an appendectomy.

As the chief surgeon at Kane Summit Hospital in Pennsylvania, Kane could probably perform the procedure blindfolded. The 60-year-old physician had performed more than 4000 appendectomies over his 37-year medical career. (Besides, the timing was right: He had chronic appendicitis and the organ needed to be removed anyway.)

For his experiment, Kane decided to numb the area with novocaine. “Sitting on the operating table propped up by pillows, and with a nurse holding his head forward that he might see, he calmly cut into his abdomen, carefully dissecting the tissues and closing the blood vessels as he worked his way in,” The New York Times reported. “Locating the appendix, he pulled it up, cut off, and bent the stump under.” Finished with the dirty work, he let his assistants tie up the wound.

When a reporter visited a few hours later, Kane declared he was “feeling fine” [PDF].

Overall, he was pleased with the procedure. “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,” Kane later explained to The New York Times [PDF]. “I now fully understand just how to use the anesthesia to best advantage when removing the appendix from a person who has heart or other trouble that prohibits the use of a complete anesthesia.”

This was hardly the beginning—or end—to Kane’s career as his own surgeon. Two years earlier, he had amputated his own infected finger. And 10 years after the self-appendectomy, when he was 70, Kane calmly operated on his own hernia, joking with nurses throughout the whole 50-minute operation. Thirty-six hours later, he was back in the operating room, this time patching up other people.

Kane wouldn't be the last doctor to scoop out his own appendix. In 1961, Leonid Rogozov, the sole physician at the Soviet Union's Antarctic research station, performed an emergency self-appendectomy with the station's meteorologist and mechanic as his assistants [PDF]. More recently, Beirut surgeon Dr. Ira Kahn allegedly removed the organ himself in 1986. Unlike Kane, however, Kahn didn’t put himself under the knife for the sake of a medical experiment: Stuck in a traffic jam and unable to make it to the hospital for emergency surgery, he performed the procedure from the comfort of his car.