 Sicily, October 20th, 1878. Dr Giovanni Bacchista-Grassi is performing an autopsy when he suddenly notices that the large intestine of the corpse in front of him is filled with roundworms and their eggs and he suddenly has a light bulb moment. You see at this point the medical community were very divided about how roundworms and their eggs get into the body. Dr. Grassi believed that it could only happen if you consume these eggs so this seemed to be the perfect opportunity to prove his theory. So he decides that he's going to collect the eggs out of the corpses' intestines and he's going to eat them. So he takes the eggs out of the corpses' intestines, he places them in a solution of moist excrement because apparently that's the only way to keep them alive indefinitely and then he spends the next year testing himself every single day to make sure that he doesn't have roundworms or their eggs inside him. Finally, by July 20th, 1879, he's convinced that he's absolutely free of infection so he scoops out 100 of the eggs from that solution of moist body where they've been sitting and he swallows them. A month later, to his great delight, Dr. Grassi experienced terrible abdominal pains and then he found eggs in his stool and he was absolutely thrilled because his experiment had been a success. But hang on, before you decide that you need to go and throw up now, there's more. Dr. Grassi's experiment was seen as such a success that apparently it became a sort of thing with the parasitologist. So in 1887, Friedrich Scharke and his students from the University of Basel consumed loads of tapeworm and roundworm eggs and were delighted to be able to tell the world that they had managed to grow worms that were six feet in length in their intestines and in 1922, Japanese Dr. Shimesu Koino set a new world record by consuming 2,000 of these eggs and giving himself such a full-blown infection that he actually began to cough up newborn worms from his lungs. This world is a weird place.