7 Scientists Who Definitely Weren't Just Arousing Themselves

7 John Cutler Made Guatemalan Soldiers Sleep With Syphilis-Infected Prostitutes

We make a lot of fuss about Estee Lauder scientists who test things by jamming mascara into bunny eyes, but John Cutler tested things by jamming human soldiers into sick hookers. It sounds worse than it is, or ... better, depending on how long it's been for you. During the time of the Second World War, the U.S. government was concerned with soldiers bringing gonorrhea and syphilis home as war souvenirs. As any Motley Crue groupie knows, penicillin is a quick fix for both these conditions, but medical hero John Cutler was determined to solve the STD problems. At all costs, and with no regard for ethics.

In 1943, Cutler went to Indiana and tried infecting prisoners with germs gathered from local prostitutes and applied directly to the penis. This method didn't reliably infect the prisoners as well as actual sex, but that'd be crazy, right? Almost as crazy as not telling these volunteer inmates what was being put on the tips of their penises. Which is exactly what happened. So to be clear, John Cutler rubbed disease onto the dicks of confused federal prisoners, nothing much happened, and then he kept his job.

A Guatemalan physician, Juan Funes, extended an invitation for Cutler to come to his country and refine his dick science on the proud Guatemalan people. At the time, prostitution was legal in Guatemala and sex workers were required to visit a clinic twice a week. We assume to prevent the spread of STDs. In the name of science, John Cutler was about to put a stop to that.

Funes gave Cutler a list of prostitutes known to be infected with venereal disease, but Guatemalan lists are what you use to make tamales colados, not infect a population with syphilis. You see, John Cutler was a man of impeccable scientific method, so he created his own infected prostitutes. From a batch of eight uninfected prostitutes. He got the diseases into them via spinal fluid injections, which somehow seems both less fun and more dangerous than the traditional disease gathering method. And keep in mind, his experiments on preventing STDs hadn't even begun yet, and he had already personally given eight women STDs.

John Cutler then told his sick hookers to get on as many moist, lonely dongs as possible. He had them sex up Guatemalan soldiers (who were probably confused about why they were officially being ordered to bang military hookers) and prisoners (who probably didn't ask many questions). And it, of course, didn't stop there. The hookers gave diseases to psychiatric patients, unrelated bystanders, and some say orphans as young as nine years old. And aside from the risk all nine-year-olds accept when they invite a prostitute into the back seat of their car, none of the participants gave any kind of consent. John Cutler is what pieces of shit call each other at the start of a bar fight, and even then it's usually followed by "whoa, not cool."

In total, Cutler exposed 558 soldiers, 486 psychiatric patients, 219 prisoners, and 39 others to a variety of dick-rotting diseases. To make things worse, the "research team" never got anything in the way of solid results. They found that even with trained STD-infecting professionals, they couldn't reliably infect hooker users without directly injecting. In the end, the only thing anyone learned from this travesty is that you need to keep John Cutler away from genitals.

Except they didn't even learn that. Two decades later, John Cutler was involved in the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, an unspeakable atrocity where black men in rural Alabama were offered free health care by the government and, you guessed it, secretly filled with syphilis. Cutler died 13 years ago, which can mean only one thing: Hell is completely infected with syphilis by now.

6 Nicholas Senn Stuck A Giant Balloon Up His Own Ass And Inflated It

It was the late 1800s, and Nicholas Senn was a mad-scientist-level genius, a renowned surgeon, and the owner of a handlebar mustache so manly no one thought twice when he stuck a balloon and a tube up his ass and pumped himself up with fifteen liters of hydrogen. For science.

He invented a fetish and discovered a way to diagnose ruptured bowels at the same time, though now that we think about it, those two things usually come in pairs. Dr. Senn's previous inflation experiments were done on dogs, and they did not go well, unless you consider exploding and combusting dogs a positive result. This is a man who saw a dog explode and said, "Guys, I have an idea. Let's try that in my butt."

It couldn't have just been courage, though; right? Farts were invented long before 1886, so Dr. Senn had to have known the discomfort of holding back a liter of fart. Now imagine 15 of those getting locked inside you: Congratulations, you now know Smash Mouth's song-writing process.

Let's forget about the pain for a second. Dr. Senn was an army surgeon in the Spanish-American War. He probably thought pain was a myth conceived of by wives who can't take a punch. To him, pain was just your body's way of telling you there's room for more air in your ass balloon. Which, medically speaking, was a ludicrous way to treat the war-time injuries he was hoping to help. Senn's colleagues told him inflating his patients full of pressurized, flammable gas to check if they had a hole in their intestines or if their stitches would hold was both impractical, and explosively insane.

So what do you call a man who, in the face of reason, dog detonation, and warnings from his medical colleagues, still pumps his butthole full of air? We don't know about you, but we call him ... hero.

5 Claude Barlow Infested Himself With Dick Worms To Bring The Eggs Back To America

Claude Barlow was obsessed with schistosomiasis, an awful parasitic disease endemic to Africa, which causes both diarrhea and bloody diarrhea. It's spread by schistosome worms, which require a very specific snail asshole during one of their life cycles. Attempts to bring the worms across the ocean to America for study had failed, due to lack of appropriate snail assholes. But in 1944, Claude Barlow devised a perfect, snail-less solution. He decided to infect himself, and just bring the worms home while they laid eggs in his urethra.

Seventy-six days after he slapped infected snails on his stomach, Claude had a fever that lasted for several weeks. Then he noticed sperm coming out in his pee. And in that sperm, schistosome eggs. They were also in his poop. Then he got giant red itchy bumps on his nuts, full of eggs and bloody pus. To complete the horror, they cut one of the bumps off and saw adult worms in the wound. This paragraph was brought to you by Chick-fil-A, makers of the perfect chicken sandwich for reading about parasite eggs in your stool and semen. Chick-fil-A! Try it while pus hatches from your balls!

Barlow's fevers got worse, reaching 103 degrees, accompanied by drenching sweats. He had to pee constantly, as often as once every fifteen minutes, and eggs were coming out in his urine, sperm, and poop, to the point where he was producing 30,000 eggs a day -- much like the local farms who supply Chick-fil-A with the freshest ingredients for their Chicken, Egg, and Cheese Biscuit on a Sunflower Multigrain Bagel.

Barlow had raging, blood-filled diarrhea and his bladder suffered dry heaves even after it was done evacuating every last bit of worm eggs. He could only sleep under heavy sedation, and yet he continued to faithfully note the symptoms and log samples. After all, he gave himself this horrible, disgusting disease so he could work, and it'd be weird to slack off now.

He eventually moved into the chronic stage, which usually includes things like urinary tract blockages, agony due to swollen kidneys, bladder cancer, and kidney failure. And remember, BARLOW KNEW THIS.

Ten months after Barlow infected himself, as eggs squirted from his every hole, John Hopkins decided not to study the Schistosome. Why? BECAUSE THEY STILL DIDN'T HAVE THE DAMN SNAILS to breed the eggs. Claude Barlow turned his body into a post-apocalyptic worm farm for very close to what researchers might call "nothing." So he said goodbye to his dream of studying dick worms and started working on getting rid of them. The standard cure at the time was fouadin, a mixture of medicine more toxic than most chemotherapy. It causes asthmatic coughing, fevers, and various other horrors that would seem unthinkable, if not put up against the alternative of ass-hemorrhaging worm egg diarrhea.

So Claude endured the treatment. Then three months later, the eggs came back. He repeated the treatment, and they came back again. By now he was probably rethinking the idea of filling his dick with parasites, but it was too late. The point is, all relationships have their hardships, and in the end, Claude Barlow was just a guy who really loved his dick worms.

4 Michael Smith Was Willing To Get Stung Anywhere To Discover The Most Painful Place To Get Stung

Michael L. Smith was a man unworthy of note, with absolutely no bees stinging him on the balls. Then? Destiny: A bee flew up his shorts and stung him on the balls. Now, when a bee stings most people on the genitals, they rethink their decision to fuck a sunflower. Michael, on the other hand, thought, "Hey, that didn't hurt as much as it should have. I should tell science."

Heroic Michael L. Smith began a research project. He wanted to discover which part of the human body hurt the most when stung by a honeybee. His process was simple: Over 38 days, he let honeybees sting him on 25 different parts of his body. In answer to your first question, yes: penis. And in answer to your second question, ONLY THIRD PLACE.

It took a brave man allowing honeybees to crawl all over this dick for a month to learn this, but getting stung on a human dong is apparently not as painful as getting stung the nostril or the upper lip. So it gives us great pleasure to be able to give this scientific study-backed advice: Next time you encounter bees, try your best to anger them with your penis.

3 Carmichael And Woollard Prove Putting Heavy Things On Your Balls Hurts

In 1933, Edward Carmichael And Herbert Woollard were researching the concept of referred pain. Basically, they wanted to figure out where the pain in extremities could travel. And what better place to start than the scrotum? It's right in the center of everything and it really lets you know when something's not right.

Their process was so erotic you can barely call it science. One of them lay naked on a table while the other grabbed his nuts, stretched them out, and squashed them under a pan. Then, he would add carefully piled weights to the pan, working up in 50 gram increments. The subject reached 650 grams of ball crushing before describing it as "Severe testicular pain on the right side." It's a term many men outside the scientific community refer to as "duh."

So they did it, right? They proved smashing your nuts sucks? Well, sure. But that didn't stop them from repeating the experiment with slight variations many, many, MANY times. Sometimes they used nerve blocks to see if they could prevent the subject from feeling pain, and other times they each achieved simultaneous orgasms. Our point is, you don't crush your balls this many times for this little data unless some part of you enjoys crushing balls.

You might be wondering if these naughty scientists discovered anything beyond a forbidden love for one another. Well, they learned all nerve channels lead to the testes. They learned a pound of pressure on the scrotum is enough to cause back pain. They learned two pounds caused the aching in the back to increase to a "pain of a sickening character." And they learned that if the other scientist calls you a bitch and bites you on the nipple, you may need to use one of your lab's three daily safe words.

2 Hooman Soltanian Photographed Twins' Breasts ... For, Uh ... Science

Dr. Hooman Soltanian, plastic surgeon and undercover human, visited the Twins Day Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, and asked twins for permission to photograph their breasts. He probably isn't the first person to think to try this, but he may have been the first one to succeed.

Hooman was curious about what factors affected his job security as a breast implanter. And don't let this influence how you spend your time at the next Twins Day Festival you attend, but 161 pairs of women agreed to let him photograph their tits. Soltanian took all the pictures and had his plastic surgery residents evaluate the boobs for aesthetic values like skin quality, droopiness, and symmetry. Which is to say, these people came to work and their boss said, "Drop whatever you're doing and tell me: what do you think about these tits?"

Ask any Nazi scientist and he'll tell you, a cloudy sense of right and wrong plus a pair of twins are the main ingredients for scientific dynamite. So what did Soltanian discover?

Subjective Boob Fact 1: Smoking, drinking, and multiple pregnancies make your boobs less attractive.

Subjective Boob Fact 2: Moisturizing, breastfeeding, and hormone replacement therapy make your boobs more attractive.

So what can we do with this data? Well, all women can use it to make their breasts the best they can be, obviously. And now that we think about it, 161 very specific women can use this data to figure out if they have nicer tits than their twin sister. Thanks, Dr. Hooman Soltanian!

1 Nicolae Minovici Made Erotic Asphyxiation Into A Science

Autoerotic asphyxiation refers to the act of cutting off your oxygen while you masturbate. If you're lucky, it increases the intensity of your orgasms. If you're unlucky, it ends your respected acting or musical career with a ridiculous punch line. But aside from the thrill of risking a humiliating death, what's the science behind it?

In the early 1900s, Nicolae Minovici worked as a Romanian forensic scientist who became obsessed with the process of death. Specifically, he wondered what it would be like to die by hanging. So he built himself something a marketer might call a Hangin' Yourself 2000 out of a pulley and rope. But remember, he was trying to figure out what death was like, not how hot it was to be choked. Think Kiefer Sutherland in Flatliners, not David Carradine in real life.

So Minovici stuck his own neck in his machine and choked himself -- or had his assistants crank the rope until he signaled for them to stop. He did this many times. He experimented with different knots, and measured how long he could maintain consciousness with each one. Nicolae Minovici kind of liked it. He went in hoping to meet the Grim Reaper, and ended up meeting his new fetish.

As he worked to penetrate the "boundary between worlds," both his knowledge and his erections grew. He found his near-death chokings led to the appearance of flashing lights, anesthesia, heat sensation in the head, memory loss, mental disorders, and most notably, "excitation."

Sometimes he would even try it on his assistants, grabbing their necks and choking them until they turned red. They reported similar hot, sexy symptoms. As a research team, they tried so many variations on asphyxiation, it seems extremely unlikely no one suggested they try it nude or with their dicks in cantaloupes. Minovici was, after all, devoted to finding the truth.

Minovici did more than exhaustively test. He started theorizing about all the good that can come from not-quite-dying with your neck in a rope. He concluded asphyxiation could cure mental instability if someone tried to commit suicide by hanging and failed. And, of course, there was all the "excitation." Nicolae loved the "excitation."

Despite his dangerous fetish and all the rope strangling he subjected his neck to, Minovici went on to live a long life. He eventually died of throat cancer, which probably means the Grim Reaper has at least some sense of humor.

When Britni's not researching amazingly odd fetishes to scare creepers with, she writes traditional mysteries for people who like to figure it out as you go. You can find her on Facebook, or Twitter, or find her website at britnipatterson.com

You know all those facts you've learned about psychology from movies and that one guy at the party who says, "Actually ..." a lot? Please forget them. Chances are none of them are true. Take the Stanford Prison Experiment, the one famous psychology study people can name. It was complete bullshit. Funny story actually, it turns out that when you post flyers that say, "Hey, do you wanna be a prison guard for the weekend? Free food and nightsticks," you might not get the most stable group of young men. So join Jack O'Brien, Cracked staff members Dan O'Brien and Michael Swaim, and Psychology Professor Martie G. Haselton of UCLA as they debunk Rorschach tests, the Mozart effec,t and middle child syndrome, so soon you can be that person at the party who says, "Actually ..." Get your tickets here!

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