page_title: Self-experimentation in medicine
section_title: Hydrogen cyanide
hierarchical_section_title: Self-experimentation in medicine / Notable examples / Poisons / Hydrogen cyanide
caption_attribution_description: Sir Joseph Barcroft, from a photograph lent by Professor H. Barcroft. Iconographic Collections Keywords: Joseph Barcroft
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: Joseph Barcroft, in 1917, tested hydrogen cyanide on himself as part of research into poison gas in World War I.   He was shut in a chamber with a dog and exposed to the gas.  Barcroft continued with the experiment even after the dog went into tetanic convulsions and appeared to die.  The experiment was continued for less than two minutes.  The next morning the dog was found to be alive and apparently fully recovered.  It is not known why dogs are more susceptible to the gas than humans.
  For other self-experiments by Barcroft, see § Temperature and pressure
caption: Joseph Barcroft
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