Stan D Ardman is no ordinary patient. He's survived repeated heart failure, asthma attacks, fluid on the lungs and dehydration. The 30-year-old has even undergone a sex change to become a "granny", only for the transformation to be reversed hours later.
But Stan isn't an extra on ER, he's one of two new computer-controlled manikins being piloted at the University of Bristol to give medical students the chance of performing complex treatments they wouldn't be allowed to perform on real people, such as inserting drips into veins.
The manikins, officially known as human patient simulators, breathe, blink and urinate - and can be programmed to simulate a wide range of illnesses and reactions to different drugs.
The life-size dummies, which look something like giant Action Men or Ken dolls, can also be made to talk via a microphone in their heads, which teachers can speak through remotely.
Stan D Ardman - standard man - is the baseline programme for a healthy 30-year-old with a broken ankle. As the manikins come with both male and female genitalia, he can be turned into a healthy woman in her 70s, known as "standard granny", to demonstrate the effects of ageing.
Students will be able to use the simulators at Bristol University's new centre for excellence in teaching and learning from next January. Dr Judy Harris, deputy head of the department of physiology, told SocietyGuardian.co.uk that the manikins will revolutionise medical training.
She said: "Students have always performed a range of basic medical procedures on each other, such as monitoring their breathing and heart rate. But they can't practise invasive techniques on each other, such as putting catheters in."
"But the manikins can be programmed to simulate dozens of conditions in patients of different ages - high and low blood pressure, heart failure, irregular heart beat, asthma, fluid on the lungs, haemorrhage and shock.
"It can simulate the body's response to high altitude, show the effect of dehydration on the amount of urine produced, or what happens to someone's blood pressure after a traffic accident. Its pulse rate, the amount of oxygen it consumes and the level of carbon dioxide it produces depends on its health."
Dr Harris said the manikin's sex could be changed because some procedures, such as urinary catheterization, differed for men and women.
However, she admitted the manikins were so realistic they were a bit creepy. "They do blink spontaneously, which does take people by surprise," she said.
Leigh Bissett, the chairman of the British Medical Association's medical students' committee, learned to his cost just how realistic patient simulators can be when he had to fit one with a urinary catheter during a medical exam.
Mr Bissett, who studies at the University of East Anglia, said: "I was the first to do it that morning and the simulators' valves can be a bit stiff. I got absolutely drenched and was very wet for the rest of the exam. You can control the flow of urine but I think my examiner was enjoying seeing me suffer."
