This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
By 1984, Barry Marshall had a hypothesis that almost nobody in medicine believed: that a spiral-shaped bacterium he and pathologist Robin Warren had been finding in stomach biopsies was not a harmless passenger but the actual cause of peptic ulcer disease, a condition every textbook attributed to stress and stomach acid. Marshall could not prove it in an animal model, so he decided to prove it in the only model he had certain access to: himself.
He drank a culture of the bacterium, later named Helicobacter pylori, in July 1984, having been free of the bacterium before he drank it. Within days his wife and mother noticed his breath had turned foul, and he developed bloating and daily vomiting. Ten days after he drank the culture, a second endoscopy confirmed what he had gambled on: the bacterium had colonized his stomach lining, with the tissue damage of a genuine infection to show for it. It was not a controlled trial and it would not have survived an ethics committee's review by today's standards, but it was the kind of stark, self-directed evidence that a skeptical field could not simply wave away.