"My poor assistants!"

Leonid Rogozov wrote that in his diary about the two men he had drafted for the operation. The meteorologist would hand him instruments. The mechanic would hold the mirror and the lamp. Rogozov was the only doctor at the Soviet station of Novolazarevskaya in Antarctica, the month was April 1961, and the appendix he needed to remove was his own.

He looked over at his helpers before he began. They stood in their surgical whites, he wrote, "whiter than white themselves. I was scared too."

Then he gave himself the first injection of novocaine. "Somehow I automatically switched into operating mode, and from that point on I didn't notice anything else."