Museum of Swallowed Objects

The Mütter Museum of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia is on my list of “must visit” places in America. Not for the squeamish, the museum is probably one of the strangest museums in the U.S. — featuring basketball-size cysts, preserved abnormal fetuses, giant and dwarf skeletons, an 8-foot stuffed colon, and other medical oddities. (I suppose it’s not a family destination.)

One of the exhibits at the museum is a cabinet of swallowed objects. Open one of the drawers of the wooden cabinet and you find safety pins and buttons and other trinkets. It might not sound like much, when compared with the other oddities being showcased. However, one of the first questions that comes to mind while looking through the cabinet is: “How the ‘H’ did so many people manage to swallow so many buttons and safety pins?”

  By the way, not all the objects passed through the system. Some of the items are from patients who had to have the objects extracted. This is where Dr. Chevalier Jackson’s expertise was called for.

The collection was assembled and donated to the museum by Dr. Jackson, a pioneering laryngologist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, according to AOL News.

Mary Cappello covers Dr. Jackson’s work in a book titled Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them.

One of Jackson’s patients was a baby boy, taken to him in 1923. According to his account, Jackson removed 32 foreign bodies from within the child, including buttons, closed safety pins, bent straight pins, cigarette butts and burnt matches.

The child’s mother was dismissing evidence that her little kiddo was swallowing whatever he came across — for example, buttons among the stool in his stinky diapers. She figured they came off his clothing. Eventually, though, they had to bring their little boy to the doctor, who referred the family to Dr. Jackson.

Some of the cases involved “bizarre psychological circumstances — either by force or self-inflicted.” However, Jackson also believed that much of what he saw was carelessness. Perhaps people accidentally ingesting pennies and trinkets along with their food or drink. He was preach to people to chew everything slowly and carefully. Jackson even wrote, in 1937: “Chew your milk!”

Among his other theories are “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 “Chewing of pencils, toothpicks, grass, stalks, straw, etc., apart from general objections, is a source of foreign body accidents.”