Thanks to the discovery of Helicobacter pylori, most individuals
with duodenal and gastric ulcers can be treated with one of
several multidrug regimens. Even as late as the 1980s, common
knowledge held that ulcers were caused by stress. This view was
so entrenched that when Barry Marshall, a young Australian
physician, put forth a radical new idea that most ulcers were
caused by a simple, whirlygig-shaped bacterium the medical
establishment ridiculed him. Few believed that bacteria could
survive in the inhospitable, acid-soaked environment of the
stomach. The notion was dismissed as absurd until Marshall, fed
up with the nay saying and convinced that the bacterium which he
named Helicobacter pylori after the helicopter shape was to
blame, tested his theory on himself. He swallowed a walloping
dose of H. pylori, got sick and just as he had expected
developed an ulcer. Then he cured himself with a regimen of
antibiotics and bismuth (found in Pepto-Bismol) and changed the
course of ulcer treatment worldwide. Now