Product Description An American half-dollar. A beaded crucifix. Tooth roots shaped like a tiny pair of pants. A padlock. Scads of peanut kernels and scores of safety pins. A metallic letter Z. A toy goat and tin steering wheel. A Perfect Attendance Pin.
One of the most popular attractions in Philadelphia's world-famous Mütter Museum is the Chevalier Jackson Foreign Body Collection: a beguiling set of drawers filled with thousands of items that had been swallowed or inhaled, then extracted nonsurgically by a pioneering laryngologist using rigid instruments of his own design. How do people's mouths, lungs, and stomachs end up filled with inedible things, and what do they become once arranged in Jackson's aura-laden cabinet? What drove Dr. Chevalier Jackson's peculiar obsession not only with removing foreign bodies from people’s upper torsos but also with saving and cataloging the items that he retrieved?
Animating the space between interest and terror, curiosity and dread, award-winning author Mary Cappello explores what seems beyond understanding: the physiology of the human swallow, and the poignant and baffling psychology that compels people to ingest non-nutritive things. On a quest to restore the narratives that haunt Jackson’s uncanny collection, she discovers that all things are secretly edible. Combining original research with a sympathetic and evocative sensibility, Cappello uncovers a history of racism and violence, of forced ingestion and "hysteria," of class and poverty that left children to bank their family’s last quarters in their mouths. Here, the seemingly disparate but equally marvelous worlds of the circus and the medical amphitheater meet in characters ranging from sword swallowers and women who lunched on hardware to the sensitive, bullied boy who grew up to be the father of endoscopy.
Advance Praise "Swallow is a surprising and original work. It is biography on the slant, a meditation that transcends boundaries and genres, written with scholarship, humor, and panache. I urge you to take this journey." —Ricky Jay
"I was astonished and delighted—grabbed by the throat, indeed—by this most remarkable book, which took me down a thousand little red lanes, and laid out in excruciating and fascinating detail all those myriad of items—corks to safety pins to draughts of lye and three-foot swords—that have managed to pass down there too. It is a wonderful and bizarre book: gorge yourself on it, and gulp.” —Simon Winchester, author of Atlantic: The Biography of an Ocean
"Swallow is a wonderful, intriguing book, a fascinating glimpse into a true medical pioneer and a life's work. Mary Cappello delves into what it means to ingest things we weren’t meant to eat, and how the line between our bodies and foreign bodies can sometimes blur. Every object tells a story, and the stories here are marvelous." —Colin Dickey, author of Crankiolepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius
About the Author Mary Cappello's three previous books of literary nonfiction are Awkward, a Los Angeles Times bestseller; Called Back, a critical memoir on cancer that won a ForeWord Book of the Year Award and an Independent Publisher Book Award; and the memoir Night Bloom. A recipient of the Bechtel Prize for Educating the Imagination from Teachers and Writers Collaborative and the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize from Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, she is a former Fulbright lecturer at the Gorky Literary Institute (Moscow) and currently a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Rhode Island. She lives in Providence.
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They are fodder for the giggles--and groans--in every ER: the alarming X-rays of coins, toys, buttons, safety pins, needles, and other nonedibles of both the benign and potentially fatal variety. Award-winning author Cappello (Called Back) brings a poet's sensibility and a journalist's fascination to the modern history of foreign body ingestion through the story of early–20th-century endoscopy pioneer Chevalier Jackson, who meticulously documented his extractions, which along with his tools are on display at Philadelphia's medical Mutter Museum. "We have entered... a form of literature and not of science, a philosophical treatise... for a theater of the absurd," marvels Cappello of the detritus Jackson retrieved from throats and stomachs. Hewing closely to Jackson, Cappello chronicles the odd cases and people--and in one case, an entire family--who built his practice and reputation. Their improbable accidents elicit gasps of astonishment; how did a baby swallow more than two dozen pins, needles, and cigarette butts? Cappello smartly focuses on Jackson's peculiar life, wondrous fine art, and diligent science, transforming an intriguing medical history into a lyrical biography. Medical practitioners and nonprofessionals will be equally fascinated. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
As topics of expository writing, objects that people accidentally inhale or swallow may seem like interesting, if somewhat unappetizing, attention-getters for, at most, an in-flight magazine article. Yet Cappello, an award-winning author of three previous works of literary nonfiction, successfully devotes an entire book to the subject by focusing largely on a fascinating, eccentric doctor who collected them. Born and raised in Pennsylvania and trained as a laryngologist in Philadelphia, the colorfully named Chevalier Jackson revolutionized his chosen field by developing safe methods of extracting objects lodged in airways and abdomens. But even more interesting, as Cappello sees it, was Jackson’s obsession with painstakingly cataloguing each object, from thumbtacks to watches to miniature opera glasses, and donating the lot to Philadelphia’s famous Mütter medical museum. As a sideshow to probing Jackson’s curious asceticism and fussy, prolific studies, Cappello spends ample time ruminating on the complex mechanics of, and psychology behind, swallowing, ingestion, and appetite. While Cappello’s endless digressions and hunger for detail won’t appeal to everyone’s tastes, her prodigious rhetorical gifts are undeniable. --Carl Hays
Mary Cappello, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, is a regular contributor to the world of literary nonfiction and experimental prose. Her four books include a memoir, a detour, an anti-chronicle (or "ritual in transfigured time"), and a lyric biography. She is the author of Night Bloom: An Italian/American Life (Beacon Press); Awkward: A Detour (a Los Angeles Times bestselling book-length essay on "awkwardness"); Called Back, and most recently, Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them.
Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life, received a ForeWord Book of the Year Award and an Independent Publishers Award (IPPY). "Getting the News," an excerpt from Called Back that appeared in the Summer 2009 issue of The Georgia Review, won a GAMMA Award for Best Feature from The Magazine Association of the Southeast. Called Back was also a Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, and a Publishing Triangle Award, the judges for whom described the book this way:
"The narrative of cancer has become disconcertingly familiar to us. But Mary Cappello turns the story inside out, folds it up, and deftly re-opens it into something new and rather marvelous. This is someone who reads Proust on the gurney while waiting to be wheeled into surgery. She brings us along for the ride, and it's a dizzying, discursive delight. With a bracing combination of intellectual and emotional acuity, Cappello explores the inanities and indignities of the medical establishment, the solitude and camaraderie of illness, the politics and poetics of cancer culture. "Most essays are finished before they've begun," Cappello cautions her undergraduate writing students. Her book is an essay continually striking off into unexpected terrain with giddy courage and wonderment. Called back across that grim border, Cappello brings with her a luminous gift."
Some of Cappello's recent essaying addresses Gunther von Hagens' bodyworlds exhibits (in Salmagundi); sleep, sound and the silence of silent cinema (in Michigan Quarterly Review); the psychology of tears (in Water~stone Review); the uncanny dimensions of parapraxis and metalepsis (in Interim), and the aesthetics of the short form. Her experimental prose piece, "Objective Correlatives: a trialogue on love" appearing in Hotel Amerika was just nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her work has enjoyed numerous Notable Essay of the Year citations in Best American Essays. A recipient of the Dorothea Lange/Paul Taylor Prize from Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies and the Bechtel Prize for Educating the Imagination from Teachers and Writers Collaborative, Cappello is a former Fulbright lecturer at the Gorky Literary Institute (Moscow, Russia) and currently Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island where she teaches courses in Creative Writing, Literature and Medicine, nineteenth century American literature and culture, Literary Acoustics, and more. Her latest book-length project on a single theme is a foray into sound and mood, tentatively titled In the Mood.
For media features (from the LA Times to the New York Times, from Salon.com to the Huffington Post, to radio appearances in Vancouver and Australia),a schedule of appearances, reviews, and projects relative to SWALLOW, please visit www.swallowthebook.com
Cappello is interested, along with a number of other contemporary nonfiction writers, in restoring the word "essay" to its verb form. For more information, including interviews with Julie Bolcer for HERE! TV, NPR affiliate Celest Quinn for "Afternoon Magazine,"and Jean Feraca for "Here on Earth," go to her website: www.awkwardness.org,
or read more on her Faculty Homepage: http://www.uri.edu/artsci/eng/Faculty/Cappello.html
or visit her youtube channel, where a series of visual meditations on awkwardness can be found.
The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia has long been a site of pilgrimage for the unsqueamish who are interested in medical curiosities or just general freakishness. Under a stairway there is a cabinet with heavy drawers which visitors are invited to open. Within each drawer are further compartments, each of them containing a small object. The objects are not extraordinary, and they certainly are not as dramatic as some of the museum's other exhibits. There are coins, brooches, a steering wheel from a toy automobile, safety pins, a crucifix, a watch, a padlock, peanut kernels, a bullet, and hundreds more, objects of such diversity that it is hard to see what might unite them. These are, however, the Chevalier Jackson Foreign Body Collection. Dr. Jackson plucked the items from the interiors of bodies where they had no business being, from esophagi, stomachs, and bronchial tubes. He would have been distressed, perhaps, that they were curiosities in a museum which houses many monstrosities, for he had indexed each object with data about the age and sex of the person from which it was extracted, the procedure used, and so on. He said that the collection was, "in my opinion, of enormous clinical value to the physician and surgeon." Dr. Jackson had a mission, to increase doctors' understanding that people swallow or inhale such items with distressing frequency, and that such accidents need to be considered when any patient comes in with throat, chest, or stomach complaints. The story of Dr.... Jackson and his collection is a strange one, oddities marshaled in the hope of relief of human suffering, and it is told with enthusiasm and admiration in _Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them_ (The New Press) by literary nonfiction writer Mary Cappello. It is a lovely union of the bizarre and the hopeful.
Chevalier Jackson was indeed a curious man in both senses of the term. He graduated from medical school in 1886. He was a flinty character who didn't smoke or drink, and who advised against the eating of peanuts because he knew how they gave a risk of sudden death. He treated Pittsburgh's urban poor and was far more interested in helping them than in getting paid for his services; he was rarely paid because most of his patients were "charity cases," although he did insist on keeping the extracted foreign body. This sometimes rankled the patient if the item was a coin. His work was influential and was revered by his peers, although they tended to find Jackson himself cold and even phobically unsociable. How did all that hardware get inside those bodies? Here is Jackson on one cause: "Putting inedible objects in your mouth increases your risk of choking." We use our mouths as third hands; who has not held tacks or safety pins (Dr. Jackson gleefully called these "danger pins") with the lips while the hands were busy elsewhere? A fall, a cough, a surprise, a moment of forgetfulness, and down they go. Then there are the more disturbing cases of malevolent parents or caretakers who had a pathological intent of making children swallow pins or stones. Less worrisome, although often still deeply weird, are the people who wanted to swallow objects. There are those who hysterically swallow or inhale tacks or other objects with the express purpose of enjoying the "sympathy" issued by those who will look after them. One lady depressed over her husband's death ate glass, a penny, and hairpins with the intent to end her life. A completely different category of metal-eater is that of sword swallowers, who also make money by making non-food items go down their guts. It was sword swallowers who taught physicians how the mouth, throat, and neck could be positioned to allow endoscopes to be lowered into useful working sites.
Probably Dr. Chevalier Jackson would have been impatient with a sword swallower because Jackson was constantly trying to reduce the risk of people putting dangerous things inside themselves. Nonetheless, his own career was built upon passing his instruments down inside them, and he was hugely successful at the art and the science of his work. He practiced with manikins and animals and never made an accidental perforation with the scopes he stuck into people. His survival rate of patients from whom he removed objects, often patients that no other doctor would risk touching, was better than 95%. And each object he took out took its place in his peculiar, fetishistic collection. Often poetic, Swallow is funny and repellant by turns, and fascinating throughout. It is a winning presentation about weird patients and the weird contents of their insides, and the weird doctor who worked so hard to bring the objects out and make an educational display of them.Read more ›
In "Biography or Biographeme," which Mary Cappello posted as a guest blogger for Powell's Books, she explains that she was aiming for "an extended, deeply researched poem" with Swallow, as opposed to the "definitive" or "official" biography of Dr. Chevalier Jackson. I'm pleased to report that she succeeds on that score.
Throughout the book, Cappello capitalizes the word "thing" when it "refer[s] to an object that has undergone a transformation once it has been swallowed, retrieved, studied, and placed in Jackson's collection." I loved that in addition to detailing the metamorphoses of particular swallowed objects into Things, her supporting prose is full of this kind of magic. The esophagus and windpipe are not merely adjacent, they share a "party wall." A sword swallower becomes a "human sheath." A "knobless drawer" invokes "tight-lipped terror." Jackson, who could close a safety-pin lodged in a patient's esophagus, becomes a "time-bomb detonator."
I also enjoyed Jackson's own memorable analogies that Capello quotes, including his likening using a forceps to walking on stilts and his discussing a foreign body's position in terms of obstetrics.
Here's a passage on umbrella-headed tacks that Capello shares from Jackson's "Diseases of the Air and Food Passages of Foreign-Body Origin": "The umbrella-shaped head with its weighty stem for ballast certainly is well constructed for being drawn in by the inspiratory blast, like a parachute on a rising wind...This shape, as well as the point, resists bechic expulsion unless the tack is overturned; we all know the pull of an umbrella when the wind gets under it...."
If a conventional biography is the play-by-play part of a sports broadcast on the radio, Swallow is not only the color commentary -- it's a layered, textured soundscape that includes vendors yelling "Programs! Get your programs!" or "Cotton candy!", the organist playing high-energy phrases, the crowd cheering, and maybe thunder in the distance.Read more ›
A dazzling sketch of a pioneer doctor and the objects he retrieved from the bodies of his patients.
With the same care and precision Chevalier Jackson once exhibited within the human body, Cappello examines his work and what it means to be human, vulnerable, swimming in the reckless depth of every breath.
I would say this book offers a rich tapestry of thought that adds to our collective consciousness of medicine and magic. With a poet's sensibility, Cappello questions what few are willing to plummet. To read this work of nonfiction, "We might have to ask why we say we swallow our pride and not our envy, anger or greed." For this sentence and so many more, I am in wild admiration of this marvelous and powerful work.
To open this book called Swallow, we take an unflinching look within, to every beautiful and tender corridor.
SWALLOW is a strikingly original and tremendously interesting meditation on the work and life of Dr. Chevalier Jackson. An attentive, generous, and gifted reader, Cappello does not simply present the odd life of Jackson or recount the miraculous extractions of surprising and dangerous objects that made Jackson world famous (although she does both in gripping detail). She does much more. She resurrects the objects that Jackson almost magically extracted from throats, lungs, and abdomens, and then meticulously collected and cataloged in a bizarre cabinet of curiosities.
In some sense, Cappello's project is a lot like Jackson's: he retrieved objects and she retrieves meaning. But in deeper sense, Cappello sets out to invert the impulse motivating Jackson--where Jackson sought to remove objects from bodies and to make them stop circulating in the world, Cappello sets out to re-imagine these objects' rich relationship to particular bodies, to re-embed these forgotten objects and lives in the world, giving them a history simultaneously real and imaginary. She tells stories and offers connections that are at times shocking and at times quite funny. I find her skill as astonishing as Jackson's.
This book defies categories. Cappello says that "an archive is a dreamscape," and Cappello elegantly harnesses the uncanny associative brilliance of dreams to think about Jackson. Cappello inspired me to appreciate the complexity of something I do all but automatically a thousand times a day---swallow.
