Click on image to buy from Amazon.ComAs topics of expository writing, objects that people accidentally inhale or swallow may seem like interesting, if somewhat unappetizing, attention-getters for, at most, an in-flight magazine article. Yet Cappello, an award-winning author of three previous works of literary nonfiction, successfully devotes an entire book to the subject by focusing largely on a fascinating, eccentric doctor who collected them. Born and raised in Pennsylvania and trained as a laryngologist in Philadelphia, the colorfully named Chevalier Jackson revolutionized his chosen field by developing safe methods of extracting objects lodged in airways and abdomens.
But even more interesting, as Cappello sees it, was Jackson’s obsession with painstakingly cataloguing each object, from thumbtacks to watches to miniature opera glasses, and donating the lot to Philadelphia’s famous M?tter medical museum. As a sideshow to probing Jackson’s curious asceticism and fussy, prolific studies, Cappello spends ample time ruminating on the complex mechanics of, and psychology behind, swallowing, ingestion, and appetite. While Cappello’s endless digressions and hunger for detail won’t appeal to everyone’s tastes, her prodigious rhetorical gifts are undeniable. –Carl Hays, Booklist
The M?tter Museum in Philadelphia has long been a site of pilgrimage for the unsqueamish who are interested in medical curiosities or just general freakishness. Under a stairway there is a cabinet with heavy drawers which visitors are invited to open. Within each drawer are further compartments, each of them containing a small object. The objects are not extraordinary, and they certainly are not as dramatic as some of the museum’s other exhibits. There are coins, brooches, a steering wheel from a toy automobile, safety pins, a crucifix, a watch, a padlock, peanut kernels, a bullet, and hundreds more, objects of such diversity that it is hard to see what might unite them. These are, however, the Chevalier Jackson Foreign Body Collection. Dr. Jackson plucked the items from the interiors of bodies where they had no business being, from esophagi, stomachs, and bronchial tubes. He would have been distressed, perhaps, that they were curiosities in a museum which houses many monstrosities, for he had indexed each object with data about the age and sex of the person from which it was extracted, the procedure used, and so on. He said that the collection was, “in my opinion, of enormous clinical value to the physician and surgeon.” Dr. Jackson had a mission, to increase doctors’ understanding that people swallow or inhale such items with distressing frequency, and that such accidents need to be considered when any patient comes in with throat, chest, or stomach complaints. The story of Dr. Jackson and his collection is a strange one, oddities marshaled in the hope of relief of human suffering, and it is told with enthusiasm and admiration in _Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them_ (The New Press) by literary nonfiction writer Mary Cappello. It is a lovely union of the bizarre and the hopeful.
Chevalier Jackson was indeed a curious man in both senses of the term. He graduated from medical school in 1886. He was a flinty character who didn’t smoke or drink, and who advised against the eating of peanuts because he knew how they gave a risk of sudden death. He treated Pittsburgh’s urban poor and was far more interested in helping them than in getting paid for his services; he was rarely paid because most of his patients were “charity cases,” although he did insist on keeping the extracted foreign body. This sometimes rankled the patient if the item was a coin. His work was influential and was revered by his peers, although they tended to find Jackson himself cold and even phobically unsociable. How did all that hardware get inside those bodies? Here is Jackson on one cause: “Putting inedible objects in your mouth increases your risk of choking.” We use our mouths as third hands; who has not held tacks or safety pins (Dr. Jackson gleefully called these “danger pins”) with the lips while the hands were busy elsewhere? A fall, a cough, a surprise, a moment of forgetfulness, and down they go. Then there are the more disturbing cases of malevolent parents or caretakers who had a pathological intent of making children swallow pins or stones. Less worrisome, although often still deeply weird, are the people who wanted to swallow objects. There are those who hysterically swallow or inhale tacks or other objects with the express purpose of enjoying the “sympathy” issued by those who will look after them. One lady depressed over her husband’s death ate glass, a penny, and hairpins with the intent to end her life. A completely different category of metal-eater is that of sword swallowers, who also make money by making non-food items go down their guts. It was sword swallowers who taught physicians how the mouth, throat, and neck could be positioned to allow endoscopes to be lowered into useful working sites.
Probably Dr. Chevalier Jackson would have been impatient with a sword swallower because Jackson was constantly trying to reduce the risk of people putting dangerous things inside themselves. Nonetheless, his own career was built upon passing his instruments down inside them, and he was hugely successful at the art and the science of his work. He practiced with manikins and animals and never made an accidental perforation with the scopes he stuck into people. His survival rate of patients from whom he removed objects, often patients that no other doctor would risk touching, was better than 95%. And each object he took out took its place in his peculiar, fetishistic collection. Often poetic, Swallow is funny and repellant by turns, and fascinating throughout. It is a winning presentation about weird patients and the weird contents of their insides, and the weird doctor who worked so hard to bring the objects out and make an educational display of them. – R. Hardy, Amazon.Com Customer Review
The Washington Post Book World – February 20, 2011 (Excerpt)
A 7-year-old girl has been unable to drink liquids for a week after she burned her throat by swallowing lye. Gently working his forceps, Dr. Chevalier Jackson, a pioneer in the field of laryngology, removes a chunk of scar tissue blocking the girl’s esophagus. When a nurse hands the girl a glass of water, she takes a drink. “It went slowly down; she took another sip, and it went down,” Jackson wrote about the case. “Then she gently moved aside the glass of water in the nurse’s hand, took hold of my hand, and kissed it.”
In “Swallow,” Mary Cappello retells the forgotten story of Jackson, who was once one of the country’s most popular and respected physicians. Today, many of the items he removed from people’s insides are filed away in a metal cabinet at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia: safety pins, needles, nails, a crucifix with several rosary beads still attached, chicken bones, a half-dollar dated 1892, a bullet and a pin that ironically reads “B-A-2-Way Looker Says Care Fu Lee.” [Read the full article...]
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