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

Abstract

Autobiographies by the men and women who inhabited the world of science at the turn of the twentieth century are often leavened by eccentricities that spring from fecund minds and often-solitary lives. In her biography of Chevalier Jackson, the author Mary Cappello captured the quirks, and the brilliance, of one of America's most prolific, and obscure, medical pioneers. The book grew from an encounter the author had in the Mutter Museum of the College of the Physicians of Philadelphia with a collection of foreign bodies retrieved from the lungs, stomachs, and throats of people by Jackson, who then set about obsessively cataloging the objects. In Cappello's hands, the objects tell the story of the man who removed them and of the world of medicine in the early-to-mid twentieth century. Not, strictly speaking, an academic work, Swallow is scholarly in terms of its research. The author utilized not only the foreign body collection, but Jackson's papers, Philadelphia newspapers, and assorted other archival material. Rather than frame her subject, Jackson, in a chronology of his life's progression, Cappelo instead offers episodes from his life, all of which are linked, in some fashion, to objects in the collection. This is Cappello at her best, a simple pin or button, rescued from the innards of a suffering patient, initiates a journey that often moves from Jackson's clinic in Philadelphia to his boyhood days as a bullied youth in late-nineteenth-century western Pennsylvania, and thence to a meditation concerning the mystery behind the physiology of swallowing. Cappello matched her narrative, at times disjointed, to the personality of her subject; one can almost feel the manner in which Jackson thought and acted through Cappello's style, a factor sure to draw casual readers into her book.