Gut Suicide

For decades, medical consensus was absolute: stress and spicy food cause ulcers. The stomach is too acidic for anything to live in it. Barry Marshall, a young Australian doctor, disagreed. He found a strange bacteria (H. pylori) in ulcer patients. The medical establishment laughed at him. He was ridiculed at conferences and ignored by journals. Frustrated and desperate, Marshall did the unthinkable: he took a beaker of the bacteria from a sick patient's gut and drank it. Within days, he began to vomit and developed the very disease he was studying. This book tells the incredible story of how one man's dangerous self-experiment overturned a century of medical dogma, cured millions of chronic pain, and eventually won him a Nobel Prize. A testament to the fact that science advances one funeral—or one vomit—at a time.