Self-surgery  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Related e

Wikipedia Wiktionary Shop Featured: Rhombicuboctahedron by Leonardo da Vinci

Self-surgery is the act of performing a surgical procedure on oneself. It can be a rare manifestation of a psychological disorder, an attempt to avoid embarrassment or legal action, or an act taken in extreme circumstances out of necessity.

Real

• Leonid Rogozov (1934 — 2000), performing an appendectomy on himself[1], a famous case of self-surgery.

In fiction

• In the 1984 film The Terminator, the android title character, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, fixes a malfunctioning arm and removes a defective eye using an X-Acto knife in a gory scene at a bathroom sink.
• In the 1982 film First Blood, the main character (played by Sylvester Stallone) stitches closed an open wound in his own arm using a needle and thread taken from the hollow handle of his survival knife.
• In the 1987 Peter Jackson film, Bad Taste, one of the characters injures his head from a fall and then keeps his brains from leaking out by wearing a hat, and later a belt. Realizing that he is losing too much brain matter, he replaces the missing parts of his own brain with some from the head of an alien he kills.
• In the 1990 film Predator 2, the extraterrestrial Predator is injured in a shootout and breaks into an apartment, where it smashes a hole in the a wall and uses the crumbled plaster mixed with an advanced medical substance to heal an arm gash. This species's highly-developed ability to mend itself is mentioned in the original Predator, although briefly.
• In the 1991 film version of The Story of Ricky, the protagonist ties together a tendon in his arm after it's cut by someone else with a knife.
• In 1994 film Léon, the title character removes a bullet and stitches the wound in the shower.
• In the 1998 film Ronin, Robert De Niro's character, who had past surgical experience, directs the removal of a bullet from his abdomen.
• In the 1998 film Pi, Max Cohen (played by Sean Gullette) is tortured by dementia. In an effort to relieve his psychotic episodes, he trepans himself by drilling a hole in his head with a power drill.
• In the 1999 manga series "Shaman King", Faust VIII performs surgery on himself when protagonist Yoh Asakura breaks his tibia. He hooks himself up to morphine and then has his dead wife retrieve a tibia of matching proportions. He rips the bone out and performs the surgery, much to Yoh's horror.
• In 2000's manga Battle Royale, the main antagonist Kazuo Kiriyama finds that he is unable to properly flex his trigger finger, and cuts his upper arm open to tape damaged muscles back into place.
• In the 2004 film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Dr. Stephen Maturin (played by Paul Bettany) is forced to perform emergency surgery on himself to remove a bullet from his abdomen, as there are no other trained medical professionals onboard his ship.
• In the seven Saw movies, of which the first was released in 2004, a central theme is the idea of injuring oneself to survive, including amputations and self-surgeries.
• In the 2004 Television Series LOST, Jack Sheppard attempts to take out his own appendix with the aid of Juliet Burke while Kate Austen holds a mirror to allow Jack to see.
• In the 2004 video game Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, becoming injured often requires self-surgery via the Survival Viewer menu to splint broken bones, remove bullets or arrows from the body and various other treatments using rudimentary field medical techniques to avoid a drain in stamina or health.
• In the 2006 Spanish film Pan's Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno), Captain Vidal (played by Sergi López) has his cheek cut open from the corner of his mouth almost to his ear by Mercedes (played by Maribel Verdú). In front of a mirror, he neatly stitches the wound shut with needle and thread, and though in great pain, does not use any kind of anesthetic (though he does have a stiff drink afterwards).
• In the 2006 novel A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon, protagonist George Hall, who is undergoing a mental breakdown, becomes convinced that a strange growth on his body is cancer. He disregards his doctor's diagnosis of eczema, and removes it with a pair of scissors.
• In the 2007 film No Country for Old Men, Anton Chigurh (played by Javier Bardem) cleans and stitches his own wounds with stolen supplies, after his leg is badly injured by a shotgun blast. He first disinfects the site of the injury with a solution of iodine, then injects an anesthetic (lidocaine) before suturing the wound.
• In the 2007 film Shooter, Bob Lee Swagger (played by Mark Wahlberg) is forced to use self surgery when shot twice by a policeman. He makes a homemade IV solution by mixing salt and sugar with water, and injects it into his arm with a meat injector.
• Stephen King's short story "Survivor Type" is about a surgeon trapped on a small island who is forced to operate on himself. He anaesthetises himself with the drugs he was attempting to smuggle.
• In the episode "After Hours" of the medical drama House, the protagonist attempts with little success to excise a cluster of leg tumours in his bathtub.
• In episode 28 of the 2004 adaptation of Osamu Tezuka's manga Black Jack, the protagonist successfully performs open body surgery on himself to remove a parasite while in the middle of the Australian outback.
• In the 2012 sci-fi horror film Prometheus, protagonist Elizabeth Shaw (played by Noomi Rapace) self-performs a Ceasarian to remove an alien growing inside her.