page_title: Self-experimentation in medicine
section_title: Yellow fever
hierarchical_section_title: Self-experimentation in medicine / Notable examples / Infectious diseases and vaccines / Yellow fever
caption_attribution_description: Portrait of Jesse William Lazear American physician
context_page_description: Self-experimentation refers to scientific experimentation in which the experimenter conducts the experiment on her- or himself. Often this means that the designer, operator, subject, analyst, and user or reporter of the experiment are all the same. Self-experimentation has a long and well-documented history in medicine which continues to the present. Some of these experiments have been very valuable and shed new and often unexpected insights into different areas of medicine.
  There are many motivations for self-experiment. These include the wish to get results quickly and avoid the need for a formal organisational structure, to take the ethical stance of taking the same risk as volunteers, or just a desire to do good for humanity. Other ethical issues include whether a researcher should self-experiment because another volunteer would not get the same benefit as the researcher will get, and the question of whether informed consent of a volunteer can truly be given by those outside a research program.
context_section_description: In Cuba, U.S. Army doctors from Walter Reed's research team infected themselves with yellow fever including 
  James Carroll, Aristides Agramonte, and, most notably, Jesse Lazear, who died from yellow fever complications in 1900. These efforts ultimately resulted in proof of the mosquito-borne nature of yellow fever transmission and saved countless lives. Stubbins Ffirth had investigated the contagious nature of the disease at the end of the 18th century.
  There was an unsuccessful campaign to award a Nobel Prize to Reed's team.  Lazear, in any event, could not be awarded the prize because it is never given posthumously. However, a Nobel Prize was awarded to a later yellow fever researcher and self-experimenter, Max Theiler who, in 1951, developed the first yellow fever vaccine and was the first to try it.
caption: Jesse Lazear
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