In 1921, Dr. Evan O’Neill Kane did something most surgeons would never dare: he operated on himself.

Kane was the chief surgeon at Kane Summit Hospital in Pennsylvania, and he was 60 years old when he felt the familiar pain of appendicitis. He didn’t just call a colleague. He wanted to prove a point.

Kane was one of the loudest champions of **local anesthesia**. In those days, most patients were put under with general anesthesia like ether or chloroform, which carried real risks, including nausea, breathing complications and sometimes death. Kane believed that numbing only the area being cut was safer. Critics doubted it could work for a serious abdominal operation, so he decided the best proof was to be the patient himself.

Kane had the area around his abdomen numbed with a local anesthetic. Then, propped up on the operating table so he could see what he was doing, he directed a team of assistants and performed the incision himself. Because he was awake the whole time, he could watch the procedure and speak throughout it.

The operation reportedly took around an hour and a half. There were tense moments, since an operation like this is hard to do on your own body, but he completed it and had the appendix removed.

The result was exactly what he hoped for. Kane recovered well, with no dangerous reaction to the anesthetic, and was back on his feet and back to work soon afterward. Newspapers around the world reported the story.

Kane’s confidence in local anesthesia never faded. Years later, in 1932, he reportedly operated on himself again, repairing a hernia, when he was in his seventies.

Today, local and regional anesthesia are standard parts of modern medicine, used in everything from dental work to many surgeries. Kane was early, bold and eventually proven right, though few doctors would recommend following his example by cutting into themselves.

So the next time you hear about someone “doing it themselves,” remember Dr. Kane: a surgeon who trusted his method so much that he staked his own body on it.