Leonid Rogozov – a hero-surgeon
Remember Jerri Nielson Fitzgerald, the American doctor who diagnosed herself with breast cancer at Antarctica’s Amundsen-Scott Station? It’s impossible to get people in or out of most of Antarctica during the winter, so the US Air Force dropped in chemotherapy meds and she had her non-medical colleagues perform a biopsy.

That’s pretty badass, but as usual Russia has us beat in this department. Meet Dr. Leonid Rogozov, perhaps the only person in history who’s ever had to remove his own appendix (there was another guy in 1921, Evan O’Neill Kane, but he only did it to prove a point). Rogozov was the only doctor stationed at Novolazarevskaya in the winter of 1961, and after diagnosing himself with acute appendicitis realized he’d have to operate or die. He assembled a crack medical team consisting of a meteorologist and a mechanical engineer, who both um, held the mirror, and proceeded to cut a 12cm hole in his own abdomen. He injected antibiotics into the incision, stitched it up and within a week he’d fully recovered.

I don’t know who writes English Russia, but sometimes they hit the nail on the head:

“An astronaut-pilot of the USSR, a Hero of the Soviet Union, German Titov wrote in his book “My blue planet”:

“In our country an exploit is life itself.

… We admire the Soviet doctor Boris Pastukhov, who injected himself with plague vaccine before applying it on the sick people: we envy the courage of the Soviet doctor Leonid Rogozov who made an appendix removal operation on himself in the hard conditions of the Antarctic expedition.

Sometimes I reflect upon this in solitude and ask myself if I could do the same and only one answer comes to my mind: ‘I would do my best…’“