The Hofling Experiment
The Hofling experiment was conducted in 1966 and involved a fake doctor, a fake drug and 22 quite real and unsuspecting nurses. The "doctor" would call each of the nurses during their night shifts at the hospital and ask them to check to see if they had a certain drug. After the nurse found the drug and answered in the affirmative (in fact, the vials contained glucose solution), the doctor would ask the nurse to inject patient "X" with a dangerous overdose of the drug. Actually, this requires the doctor to sign a special form, but the doctor said that he was in a terrible hurry, so he would come back later and sign all the documents.
In the experiment, everything was made for the nurse to refuse to administer the drug. She had to break at least three hospital rules: nurses were not allowed to take instructions over the phone, the dose of the drug offered to administer was twice the maximum limit listed in the instructions on the box, and the drug itself was not on the list of approved drugs. Despite these rules and precautions, the results were frightening: Twenty-one nurses out of 22 easily broke all the rules and followed the instructions given by a random person on the phone.
Sigmund Freud and the treatment of the nose.
Emma Eckstein was one of Sigmund Freud's first patients who sought his help for her anxiety disorder. Unfortunately, among the various symptoms of the disorder was a nosebleed. Although this had nothing to do with neurosis, Freud had always paid particular attention to the nose, seeing it as a link to the genitals. There are many versions of this story between Eckstein and Freud, and some aspects of it were so bizarre that Freud's descendants saw fit to hide some of their correspondence from the public. But one episode of this story everyone seems to agree on: although Freud considered Eckstein's nose problems to be entirely psychogenic in nature, he still decided to experiment a little.
Freud brought his patient to Wilhelm Fliss, an otolaryngologist who had operated on his own nose in the past. He had Fliss operate on Eckstein's nose as well. The operation was unsuccessful, and the patient nearly died. Bleeding from the nose (and then the mouth) only got worse, eventually it swelled up. A frightened Freud called in surgeons from Vienna, who eventually managed to clean out the nose... and remove nearly half a meter of gauze left inside the nasal cavity.
Eckstein took the situation surprisingly well and even gently mocked the shocked Freud as he escaped from the operating room to recharge with a good portion of cognac. At the same time, Freud himself did not reproach himself too much for what had happened. He convinced himself that the whole situation was a pure accident that could have happened to anyone.
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