A while back I posted about an old daguerreotype showing Mozart’s wife Constanze and pointed out that this was something that I never expected to see.  Weel folks, I have continued to scour the photographic world and today have something to offer up that possibly trumps Constanza.  It is a photographic of a man removing his own appendix.

The whole story is related in a feature article by Sara Lentati for the BBC World. In 1961 Soviet surgeon and Antarctic explorer  27-year-old Leonid Rogozov started feeling sick with a strong pain on the right side of his abdomen.  He soon realized that he had appendicitis and that there was no one else at the Novolazarevskaya Station, who could perform the surgery.  Leonid performed the operation under local anesthesia.  He attempted to use a mirror but the right-left reverse image posed problems and Rogosov performed the operation looking down at his abdomen. Fortunately the image is in black and white.  There’s a reason that they call it gross anatomy.