Guinea pig doctors and working lunches

摘要

Doctors have always had a bad press. Even Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine, was not above suspicion, with one commentator remarking that the great man would take on as a pupil anyone who could pay the fee.So it is good to be able to report on an area where doctors have been selfless to the point, in some instances, of laying down their lives in the interests of humanity at large: drug development through self-experimentation. None of these doctors is a household name and most are hidden away in the more mildewed crannies of the medical history archives. Even a pioneering self-experimenter like Purkinje only appears in the medical history books because of his other accomplishments, including the discovery of his namesake cells in the cerebellum.