Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them

by Mary Cappello

c.2011, The New Press; $27.95 / $31.95 Canada; 292 pages, includes index

Take Vitamin D supplements for health.

If you're a woman, you need more calcium. Feeling slow? Take some ginko or one of those energy drinks. Your head aches, your joints are screaming, your ulcer's acting up, you're "irregular", there's always something to fix what ails you.

Is it true what they say about a spoonful of sugar? Not if you're swallowing nails, toys, buttons or any of the other thousand things you'll read about in Swallow by Mary Capello.

In Philadelphia's Mütter Museum, almost beneath a staircase, stands a cabinet filled with drawers of neatly-stored small objects meticulously saved on white cards. If you peeked inside the drawers, you'd see hairpins and nails, wire and padlocks, tiny toys, jacks, string, peanut kernels, a poker chip, and more.

These tiny items were the life's work of Dr. Chevalier Jackson, Renaissance man, painter, and inventor of the bronchoscope. Jackson perfected a method of safely removing objects from the throats, stomachs, and bronchial areas of patients in the late 1800s and early 1900s, saving most of those from painful surgery.

And he did most of the procedures as charity.

Jackson was an unusual character. Though he grew up in a mining area where brutality was common and sentimentality all but absent, he was a sensitive soul who hated to see cruelty of any sort. He loved working with wood, and his talent with sharp tools allowed him to set up his own clinic in Pittsburgh at age 22.

After marriage and starting a family, Jackson moved to Philadelphia where he became world renowned for his skills in removing foreign bodies (or, fbdy, as he called them) from people who had swallowed but could not remove them.

When he died in 1958 at age 93, Jackson had left numerous paintings (many depicting the larynxes of his patients), over 700 written and co-written articles, and 12 textbooks. He left his name on medical positions, symptoms, equipment, and anatomical areas. And he left his collection – amassed in lieu of payment from his patients – to the Museum, which is where author Mary Capello stumbled upon them...

Swallow is a beautiful book. Capello, an award-winning author, uses words as paint in this book, waxing poetic and making Jackson's story seem like a lovely rhapsody to bronchial horrors and accidents of the esophagus.

But poetry-speak, when you're more interested in a story itself, can be taken to extremes. Yes, Capello gives her readers a good gulp of research and yes, she does add a sense of lightheartedness in this book, but I felt the fun was overshadowed. So many times, as I was reading Swallow, I wanted the poetry and the digressions to get out of the way so I could learn about this fascinating man with the flaring name.

If you're in the medical profession, you'll probably like Swallow more than most people. If you're not a doctor, nurse, med student, or researcher, though, this book is a lot to wash down.