Perforations of respiratory and alimentary tracts by metallic foreign bodies.

Abstract

FOREIGN bodies in the air and food passages are quite common, such that no endoscopist's office is complete without a dramatic display of fascinating objects he has recovered from them during his medical career. Ellen Patterson,1in a review of the literature regarding such foreign bodies, reports that the earliest recorded case treated successfully is attributed to Nicholas Habicot, who, in 1620, performed a tracheotomy to relieve the incident suffocation. The objects involved were nine pistoles wrapped in a cloth, swallowed by a 14-year-old boy in imminent danger of being robbed of them. Habicot, being unable otherwise to extract these coins, forced them into the stomach by means of a lead probe, whereupon they progressed in the usual manner. In the same article is a note on the first recorded case of tracheotomy for removing a foreign body. Verdue,* in his Surgical Pathology, published in Amsterdam in 1717, described