Leonid Rogozov was born in 1934 in Dauria, a remote Siberian village near the borders of Mongolia and China, and lost his father in World War II in 1943. He trained in medicine in Leningrad, graduated in 1959, and at 26 paused his surgical training to join the Sixth Soviet Antarctic Expedition in September 1960. At the new Novolazarevskaya Station he was the only doctor among 13 men. On April 29, 1961 he woke with fever, nausea and pain in his lower right abdomen. Antibiotics failed, peritonitis set in the next day, Mirny station was over a thousand miles away, and a blizzard ruled out any flight.

At 2 a.m. on May 1 he began operating on himself, propped half on his left side, with a station driver and a meteorologist handing instruments, adjusting the light and holding a mirror. Novocaine numbed only the outer layers. He accidentally cut his cecum and had to stitch it, abandoned the confusing mirror to work by touch, and found a dark stain at the appendix base he judged a day from bursting. Fighting faintness, he worked in five minute bursts with 20 second rests and finished around 4 a.m.

• The 10 to 12 centimeter incision made under a 0.5 percent novocaine solution
• His recovery: normal temperature in five days, stitches out on day seven, back to duty in two weeks
• Photos of the operation and his Order of the Red Banner of Labour
• The Soviet rule that followed: preemptive appendix removal before isolated postings
• His later career, from a 1966 dissertation on esophageal cancer to heading surgery at a St. Petersburg institute until 2000