Able Seacat Simon

The Dickin Medal is given to animals who show "conspicuous gallantry or devotion to duty" during wartime. Most of the winners have been pigeons (they carried messages during World War II) or dogs, but there have also been a few horses and one cat.

Able Seacat Simon* of the HMS Amethyst was posthumously awarded the Dickin Medal in 1949 for removing a rat infestation and raising the sailors' morale, even after he was injured by a shell blast.

* not to be confused with Simon's Cat

I learned this by following this convoluted path on Wikipedia: Berber cuisine --> Pastilla --> Columbidae --> War pigeon --> Commando (pigeon) --> Dickin Medal --> Simon (cat), which linked to Ilford Animal Cemetery.

for SCIENCE!

In the 1800s, a surgeon named Edward Jukes came up with the technique of gastric lavage (stomach pumping). He demonstrated the efficacy of the technique by intentionally overdosing on laudanum, which contains morphine and codeine, then having his stomach washed out. He survived to write a somewhat strange book (for example, he recommended gastric lavage as a treatment for women who were prone to miscarriage).

I learned this from The Courageous - and Weird - Tradition of Self-Experimentation.