Thursday, July 7, 2011

Swallowed whole

So here's a thing. A while ago I read a BoingBoing post about a curious book called Swallow by Mary Capello. It's a history of the American Laryngologist Chevalier jackson who devoted his life to perfecting the removal of inhaled and ingested foreign bodies from his patients. He kept all the strange objects he retrieved and arranged them in display cases for the education of others. His collection survives in the Mutter medical museum in Philadelphia. Mary Capello, who is a Professor of English, stumbled across the collection and was inspired to research and write the story of Jackson's life.

I bought the book from Amazon and it was just as fascinating as the description above suggests. Anyway I wrote a review of the book for the British Medical Journal who have just published it. You can read my full review here.

I'm in the BMJ which is quite cool indeed.

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