Thousands of swallowed objects form curious collection

In a certain museum, it is filled with various things, safety pins, small trinkets, buttons and other items. And these objects were swallowed and extracted by people. Chevalier Jackson, a pioneering laryngologist of the late 19th and early 20th centruries, donated to the museum. he collected these things after he operated and extracted them from other people bodies. When we explore the various drawers, we will feel astonished and wondered. How could someone swallow such things? Mary Cappello wrote a new book about this -Swallow: Foreign bodies, their ingestion, inspiration, and the courious doctor who extracted them'(The New Press). In this book, we learn that not only about Jackson, but the lives of the people who once ingested the objects. These are stories from comic to tragic. In some cases, it's not accidents, it's voluntary swallowing, a social history of hunger, confounding human class and race.


Take, for example, the 1923 case of a boy, Joseph B. According to his account, Jackson removed 32 things from the child, including buttons, closed safety pins, bent straight pins and cigarette butts. His mother had ignored signs-such as a button found in her son's stool-by assuming it fell of his clothing. Even his friend believed that she fed these things to his child.


'The main cause of swallowed things is the carelessness'. Jackson said. He pointed to the carelessness of using an old broken egg-beater in making the custard pie. He said. 'So care should be taken, when cooking or serving food, to see that there are no loose pins or buttons in the waist that could fall into the food.' And other cause of this is chewing of pencils, toothpicks, grass, stalks, etc, he said.


Cappello also said. 'Poor children were not victims of careless caretakers or lacked self-control but because they were starving, they ate.'


This story is not only interesting to me, but also sad. Someone swallowed such things because of just a mistake. But babies ate those things because of their parents' carelessness. And poor children ate because of starving.


And there were my cases swallowing somethings-such as chewing gums,etc. It's awful to me. I think other people may feel that, too. So we should care about swallowing accidents. We can take out of eggshells from food before cooking. And we should take care of food for children. We have to prohibit them from eating things not food.

the article I referred