Mary Cappello

by Swallow: Foreign Bodies

  Temple University Special Collections Head, Thomas M. Whitehead, enabled me access to the Chevalier Jackson Postcard Collection; Gail Binderup of the American Triological Association was extremely helpful in locating sources for the Triological songbook; and, Jacqueline M. DeGroff, Curator, The Drexel Collection, graciously tracked down a reproduction of a portrait of Chevalier Jackson by S. George Phillips that hangs in the auditorium of Drexel University’s Queen Lane Campus.

  Carl Klase, Assistant Administrator, Pennypacker Mills, was a sensitive, informative, and generous guide to the Old Sunrise Mills property and new materials discovered in Jackson’s barn. I thank him, additionally, for the magical presentation of Chevalier Jackson’s coat.

  My earliest archival experience relative to the life and work of Chevalier Jackson takes precedence in my memory and in the genesis of this book. I am grateful to Tracy L. Sullivan, former Director, The John Q. Adams Center for the History of Otolaryngology—Head and Neck Surgery (AAO-HNS), American Academy of Otolaryngology (Alexandria, Virginia), and Brooke Hinrichs, former Librarian and Archivist there. This repository contains the most replete collection of medical illustrations, chalk drawings, and paintings in oil by Chevalier Jackson; thus, it was with tremendous regret that I learned of the library’s closing. I refer the reader, and any student of medicine and of medical humanities to this archive in the event of its re-opening should they wish to see the images to which my descriptions in chapter one refer, especially Jackson’s magnificent illustrations of the normal stomach and the normal larynx.

  I am greatly indebted to Louis Waddell, historian, Pennsylvania Historic and Museum Commission, for his generous feedback on my book prospectus, for recollections of his meeting with Chevalier Jackson’s granddaughter, Joan Jackson Bugbee, and her husband, Frank Bugbee, and for writing what I consider the single most important essay on Chevalier Jackson’s life and work, “Against All Odds: Chevalier Jackson, Physician and Painter.”

  I am awed by the new communities forged and friendships made as a result of my writing and research on Jackson’s fbdy collection. For trusting me with their stories and breathing life into this project, for sharing their memories with me, and painting a vivid landscape of the past that my words can only approximate, I thank Sallie Harwood Norris, widow of Dr. Charles Norris, close colleague and friend of Chevalier Jackson, and Sallie Harwood Norris’ sons, Steve Norris and Dr. Carl Norris; Margaret Derryberry and her daughter, Peggy Derryberry Gould; Arlene Maloney, widow of Dr. Walter H. Maloney, close colleague and friend of Chevalier Jackson; Arlene’s son, Dr. Hugh Maloney, and her daughter-in-law, mover and shaker, Carol Maloney, who made our meeting possible. Nothing can compare to corresponding with the living descendents of Chevalier Jackson, and I am grateful for their opening the door of their lives to me: Chevalier Jackson’s great-grandson, Frank Bugbee, Jr.; Frank’s partner, Jennifer Peters; Jackson’s great-granddaughter, Susan Bugbee Ruby; Frank Jr.’s daughter, Kristine Bugbee; and Frank Bugbee, Sr., husband of the late Joan Jackson Bugbee, daughter of Chevalier L. Jackson.

  My companion in curiosa, the San Francisco-based artist, Lisa Wood, creator of the beautiful Swallowing Plates (http://www.lisawoodcuriosities.com) has been a source of inspiration and shared intrigue. Sword swallower Dan Meyer has been extremely kind in reading and responding to the chapter in which my interpretation of his work appears, and I look forward to collaborative presentations with both of these colleagues. A gathering to mark Arlene Maloney’s donation to the Mütter Museum of a group of Jackson’s medical illustrations led to my meeting book designer and publisher of Blast Books, Laura Lindgren, whose generosity, erudition, expertise, and friendly correspondence have helped Swallow along at various strategic points in its conception and composition. I am grateful to Laura for putting me in touch with Rosamond Purcell—whose photographs and writing on natural history and nature’s anomalies were already an inspiration for Swallow, and I am additionally honored by Rosamond Purcell’s allowing The New Press to use two of her photographs of the fbdy collection in this book. Laura also put me in touch with James Edmonson, medical historian and Chief Curator, Dittrick Medical History Center and Museum, Case Western Reserve University. James Edmonson’s swift and generous response to my queries were invaluable, and his research, including an interactive CD that he shared with me gratis, “The Instruments of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy,” was an indispensable resource.

  To work on any of the Mütter Museum’s collections is to enter the sphere of influence created by curator Gretchen Worden’s singular legacy. Though I did not have the chance to meet Gretchen Worden before she died, I composed Swallow in the spirit of her life and work as glimpsed through the essays she wrote, books she collaborated on, and radio and documentary appearances that she made in which one finds a person who was not only learned, good-humored, and appropriately quirky for the work entailed by the Mütter Museum’s curation, but someone whose spirited disquisitions on the Mütter’s specimens lent a warmth to the collections, and someone who maintained a genuine interest in the lives of people whose bodies, or parts of bodies, resided there. I am grateful for the imaginative reach and unusual intellection that distinguished Gretchen Worden’s work, and I hope she would find delight and kinship in the approach that I have taken here.

  At the University of Rhode Island, my intellectual, creative, and pedagogic home since 1991, I had the good fortune of working with three dedicated librarians, Barbara Gavin, Tawanda Rand, and Marilyn Jamagocian who went above and beyond the call of duty in tracking down hard to find items and keeping on top of my daily library orders. I am especially indebted to them for their collective advice on how to treat inflammation of the thumb joint brought on by my overuse of a microfilm machine on which I attempted to read the entire run of Philadelphia’s Public Ledger for 1926 across the course of two afternoons. The English Department’s Administrative Assistant, Michelle Caraccia, provided me with clerical assistance and moral support, and I am grateful to a gifted cadre of research assistants from among the University of Rhode Island’s undergraduate and graduate student body: Lia Ottaviano, Kara Lafferty, and Erin Vachon, each of whose felicitous relationship to language helped to inspire my own. URI alum Jillian Tomaino gave me the wonderful line, “all things are secretly edible” when instructed in my poetry workshop to riff on Ashbery’s “all things are secretly bored,” and Jennifer Cochran’s writing on thirst was something I aspired to. A very special community of graduate students in my seminar in creative nonfiction let me test out passages on them late into the season’s weekly Tuesday nights and took risks with form that gave me courage—Nancy Abeshaus, Bo Allen, Theo Greenblatt, Jeremy Hawkins, Linda Langlois, Cathryn Molloy, Max Orsini, Lia Ottaviano, and Jennifer Sullivan. Claire Roche’s work on collections and collecting also spurred me on.

  My colleagues in the English Department at the University of Rhode Island teach me daily, and their own challenging and original work is in many ways a model for my own. I am grateful to Martha Elena Rojas for apprizing my partner, Jean Walton, and me, of the Mütter Museum’s giant bowel and suggesting that we go there in the first place; J. Jennifer Jones for guiding me on an excursion into a passage from Samuel Taylor Coleridge on forms that pass into and out of oneself; and, Travis Williams for making me aware of relevant passages from Dickens. Peter Covino and Dr. Tim Cavanaugh listened to excerpts from the book-in-progress, engaged me with questions, appreciated the poetry of these pages, and discussed the implications of the book’s material at length. Carolyn Betensky helped me to understand the psychoanalytic subtleties of my material; Naomi Mandel made me realize I was dealing with an extreme art; and Erik Sklar listened with the ear of a scientist. Friend and colleague Stephen Barber introduced me to the biographical model of Neil Bartlett’s book on Oscar Wilde (Who Was That Man?), brought me passages from Virginia Woolf to consider, and showed passionate interest in my descriptions of this project; as Department Chair, Professor Barber provided me with the conditions of possibil
ity for bringing this book to completion.

  I am grateful to Professor Galen Johnson, Director of the Center for the Humanities at the University of Rhode Island, to the Center’s Executive Committee, and to Dean Winifred Brownell, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, for providing me with the institutional support that made my writing possible. The Richard Beaupre Faculty Subvention Grant in the Humanities, and a Richard Beaupre Faculty Research Fellowship in the Humanities supported my travel to archives as well as costs for rights and reproductions.

  Soon after starting work on this book, I was interrupted by a cancer diagnosis that took me off course while at the same time deepening my relationship to this material. Throughout my cancer ordeal, my agent, Malaga Baldi, helped me to believe that I would live past my treatment and write the books I still had in me. Malaga’s inimitable insight, publishing savvy, her presence at my readings, her drive and her push, her humor and her subtlety, mean the world to me. “Swallow” was her title for this book from the get-go. People who helped me through the course of cancer treatment and who have helped me to stay well since are too many to mention. I include here only a handful of trusted readers, writers, and editors; friends who were okay with my passing images of swallowed objects around the dinner table, or whose respective fascination with and repulsion toward this material helped me to understand the stakes of this writing; people who shared their swallowing tales with me, and those who shared their knowledge of medicine: Jack M. Payson, Dr. Maureen Chung, Deidre Pope, Arthur Riss, Nina Markov, Divya Epstein-Lubow, Laura Doan, Sheri Wills, Marie Christine Aquarone, Monica Allen, Derek Walls, Penelope Cray, Sarah Higley, Dr. Joe DiMase, Barbara Morris, Rebecca Allan, Amy Hoffman, Colby Adams, Jerry and Eileen Spinelli, John Gennari, Emily Bernard, Stephen Corey, Bill Thomas, Dr. Noah Rosenberg and Deb Rosenberg, my literary nonfiction-writing cohorts—Edi Giunta, Barrie Jean Borich, David Lazar, David Shields, Patrick Madden, and Sara Greenslit; Dr. Thomas Duffy, Director, Program for Humanities in Medicine, Yale University School of Medicine; and, my editor at Alyson Books, Don Weise, who gave my writing on cancer a home.

  I am blessed with a group of intellectual companions and writer-friends to whom I entrust everything I write first and last, and whose own writing is the sonorous envelope for what I compose: James Morrison, Karen Carr, Russell Potter, and Jean Walton read or listened to multiple versions of these pages as my most serious interlocutors, and Russell aided my searches for everything from the cover photo for this book to the coordinates of Chevalier Jackson’s descendants. I owe special thanks to Jennifer Manlowe who insisted I read the first 150 pages to her aloud on a drive from Providence to Maine and who provided me with examples and with confidence in the singularity of this project. The nature of Swallow’s adventurous meditations are very much indebted to the work of British psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips. My admiration for the model he provides as practitioner, essayist, and public intellectual runs deep, and I am grateful for his enduring interest in my work.

  Sarah Fan, my extremely hard-working editor at The New Press, greatly aided in the clearing of Swallow’s throat. By asking me to return to what I thought I knew well, she helped me to know it even better, to revisit and revise. Sarah Fan’s dedicated close reading and the keen review of the manuscript by Gary Stimeling, copyeditor, were uncommonly illuminating, thorough, and smart.

  The constant admonitions of my father, Joseph Salvatore Cappello, that all parts of the object world were potential swallowing hazards no doubt has something to do with my excursion into swallowing’s underbelly. I am thankful for having learned to turn what he would otherwise have us fear into something worthy of my interest and understanding. My mother, the poet Rosemary Petracca Cappello, has read and supported me even when the subjects I choose to write about have given her pause. Having taught me to love and even court the strangeness in the world, and in myself, she laid the groundwork for my work on Chevalier Jackson.

  Jeannie Walton, with whom I’ve eaten breakfast, sometimes lunch, and always dinner for the past twenty years, who taught this Catholic girl the pleasures of imbibement, first caught sight of the fbdy collection and enjoined me to “look.” Her own edgy and elegant work on peristalsis, or what goes out, tempted me to think about the meanings attached to what goes in.

  Last but not least, I am immensely grateful to Dr. Chevalier Quixote Jackson for living a life that could inspire my best poetic efforts and analyses. I have tried neither to get him right nor to offer a definitive account of his life and times, but only to open the cabinet of curiosity he made, to read his books and the countless case histories of his patients with care, and with the hope that more books, poems, films, and other forms of attention will emerge from the inexhaustible treasure trove that is the Chevalier Jackson Foreign Body Collection of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

  INDEX

  Note: Page numbers in italics indicate photographs and illustrations.

  aerophagy

  African Americans: cadavers and dissection; four-year old Fred J. and the Perfect Attendance pin; slave narratives. See also race and racism in the U.S.

  Allen County Museum (Lima, Ohio)

  Allentown Morning Call

  American Broncho-Esophagological Association (ABEA), spring 2009 newsletter

  American College of Gastroenterology’s Seventieth Annual Scientific Meeting

  An American Doctor’s Odyssey (Heiser)

  American Hatpin Society

  American Laryngological, Rhinological, and Otological Society

  American Laryngological Association

  American Success Story

  “The Anatomy and Physiology of Dysphagia” (Kahrilas)

  Andrew C. and case of chronic dysphagia

  Angell, George

  Angelo, Michael

  animals: animal rights activism; cruelty to; endoscopic experiments on dogs; foundational fiction about boys and dogs/horses; Jackson’s autobiography and themes of dogs and horses

  Annals of Improbable Research

  Annals of Roentgenology: A Series of Monographic Atlases

  Annals of Surgery

  Arbus, Diane

  art. See Jackson, Chevalier (artwork)

  Ashton, Dore

  autism

  “autoplasticity,”

  Aviv, Jonathan E.

  “The Bacillus of Leprosy: A Microscopical Study of Its Morphological Characteristics” (Jackson)

  Barnes, Djuna

  Barnhill, John Finch

  “Benign Laryngeal Lesions” (Jackson)

  Bettelheim, Bruno

  bezoars

  Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse (Sewell)

  blood, swallowing of

  bodies: of doctors/patients; emotion and; as hiding places; as machines; sword swallowing and reflex control

  Bonderson, Jan

  bones: Jackson and bone collecting; the “mystery bones” found in Old Sunrise Mills attic; women’s accidental ingestion of chicken bones

  Botoman, V. Alin

  Boyce, John W.

  Boyce position

  Bozzini, Phillip

  British Medical Journal

  bronchoscopes and bronchoscopy; colors as seen through bronchoscope; distal lights; forceps and; Jackson’s clinic at Jefferson Hospital; Jackson’s curiosity about; Jackson’s designs, 26-28; Jackson’s observations and discoveries; and Jackson’s son (Chevalier L.); near-accidents; physiology of breathing (respiration) and; techniques

  Bronchoscopic Rosary

  Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy: A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy (Jackson)

  Brooklyn Medical Journal

  Bugbee, Frank

  Bugbee, Frank, Jr.

  Bugbee, Joan Jackson

  Bulgakov, Mikhail

  bulimia

  Bush, George W.

  cancer

  carelessness and fbdy ingestion; doctors and; the forms of possible carelessness; Jackson’s rules for avoiding carelessness; Michael H. and

  celebri
ties’ swallowing accidents

  Chamberlin, William B.

  Cher

  Chesnutt, Charles

  Chevalier Jackson Foreign Body Collection at the Mütter Museum; bequeathment to the College of Physicians; the catalogs, lists, and grids; categories and examples of fbdies; oddities and mystery cases of multiple fbdies; omitted narrative information from; original metal drawers and new wooden drawers; people’s efforts to find themselves within; placement of fbdies in drawers; visceral responses elicited by; what practitioners were offered by (as “canned experience”). See also fbdies (foreign bodies); fbdies (swallowed)

  Chevalier Jackson Postcard Collection in the Conwellana-Templana Collection at Temple University

  chewing

  children: crying and the inspiration of fbdies; doctors’ efforts at getting children to open their mouths; faux food and lunch play; ingestion of lye; Jackson on the aggression necessary to violate children’s bodies; Jackson’s depictions of his own childhood traumas; knowing the world by putting things in their mouths

  Choking Man (film)

  circus metaphors and endoscopy. See also sword swallowing

  The Citadel (Cronin)

  Clerf, Louis: case of Andrew C.; case of Michael H.; on early instruments and technical improvements; and Jackson’s bronchoscope with distal light; the 1952 Thomas Dent Mütter lecture to the College of Physicians on “Historical Aspects of Foreign Bodies in the Air and Food Passages,” 9, 12, 207

  Clifford, Edith

  College of Physicians of Philadelphia; Clerf’s 1952 Thomas Dent Mütter lecture on “Historical Aspects of Foreign Bodies in the Air and Food Passages,” 9, 12, 207; Jackson’s bequeathment of foreign body collection to. See also Mütter Museum of College of Physicians of Philadelphia