History
Sanctorius of Padua was probably the first documented case of self-experimentation—living on a balance for 30 years in the early 17th century, weighing himself, his daily food, liquids, and combined excretions, leading him toward the discovery of metabolism
Human scientific self-experimentation principally (though not necessarily) falls into the fields of medicine and psychology, broadly conceived. Self-experimentation has a long and well-documented history in medicine which continues to the present. In psychology, the best known self-experiments are the memory studies of Hermann Ebbinghaus, establishing many basic characteristics of human memory through tedious experiments involving nonsense syllables.
Recently, Dr. Seth Roberts and Dr. Allen Neuringer have advocated the broader use of self-experimentation, arguing that its low-cost and ease (compared to traditional large-sample experiments with human subjects) facilitate conducting a very large number of experiments, testing many treatments and measuring many things at once . This allows considerable trial and error and can lead to the generation and testing of many ideas. Self-experimentation provides superior evidence to mere anecdotal evidence, because the entire experimental is explicitly designed to test a hypothesis, but is subject to observer bias. Self-experimentation could be considered a useful adjunct to large-sample experiments in scientific research.
Read more about this topic: Self-experimentation
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