Mary Cappello

by Swallow: Foreign Bodies

  From a contemporary psychoanalytic point of view, the women in these cases were suffering from a surfeit of incorporations; taking into account the era in which they lived, their acts are an index of modern life. They could be Charlie Chaplin, whose lunch hour is being forfeited in Modern Times by a time-saving device. With the Billings Feeding Machine, the worker is strapped in place while a set of mechanical arms brings soup to his mouth and wipes it too, but the machine goes haywire and accidentally forces two bolts down his throat.

  To swallow hardware is to swallow the entrails of machinery.

  What was hardware anyway, in the machine age that preceded our own computer age of wares soft and hard? It was the stuff that held the machinery together, the minutiae that made possible the bridges and fences, the silos and chutes, rivets and tractors and lampposts. Who hasn’t experienced the allure of the hardware store with its parts and cubbies, its taxonomies—“Would that be a hex bolt or a carriage bolt I’d be needing?”—its assurance that everything in the store fits into everything else: the hardware store as a life-size Erector Set. Inside any hardware store is a skyscraper waiting to be born. It’s the “stuff” that keeps the humblest domicile together, and the everything required to build a new one. Inside any hardware store, important distinctions inhere: between tools, which are forever (like the simple fact of a hammer), and gadgets, which are of the moment (like talking bottle openers or pocket drill-bit holders).

  I wonder if, when Mabel Wolf swallowed items from her notions counter, she heard the pound and speed of traffic through her window, or the click, punch, ring of her cash register, or the liquid screeching of steel on steel of a passing train, the ping of her counter’s brass bell, or the rumble and hum of a nearby escalator, built on the same principle as the assembly line. In department stores, consumers are moved as swiftly as possible, the better to traverse the distance of so many things available for purchase; in the factories, the things are moved past the person-worker stilled into freeze frame as he adds his part to the thing again and again and again and again.

  If you think hardware stores are reserved for male roaming and grazing and fiddling, consider how much more territorial are lumberyards, which are practically cultish, or car mechanics’ offices with their obligatory Play-boy calendars. Department stores brought women into the public sphere to shop—to consume but not entirely to own—and as saleswomen to match in figure, face, and stance the type of store in which they operated. To meld. When a woman swallows hardware from a notions counter in the machine age, she announces the store’s ordering system as delusional, she makes the immanent but not apparent grand plan of little things in boxes a jumble once again, a primordial mass inside her stomach. Literary historian Elaine Freedgood (in a work-in-progress on the nature of “thing-ness” in the Victorian age) wonders if an increasing identification between people and things expresses a desire to be more machinelike, and if to be more machinelike is to be self-regulating; to be insured, like a commodity; to be better connected to the world.

  Were these female consumers (so to speak) trying to make themselves into that which was valued more highly than themselves—the machine—or were they attempting, in halting or bypassing or denying digestive processes, to slow the production line on which they played a subordinate part?

  To my great sadness and surprise—I suppose because I had invested the Chevalier Jackson fbdy collection with the romance of the cabinet of curiosity—the original drawers in which the items were stowed were not wooden but metallic. They resembled industrial ware or army surplus furniture, a stand of interlocking toolboxes colored “vomit green” (as the Mütter Museum’s administrative coordinator appropriately described them while showing me photographs). They didn’t resemble a nineteenth-century doctor’s medical chest, replete with pharmaceuticals in neat and colorful bottles, with recessed crannies and hidden slots for portable vials. They stood for the era in which the collection was founded—squarely situated in the industrial age. The newer, wooden set of drawers displaced the metal armature when the museum underwent renovation in the 1980s and reflects an attempt to better match the collection with the overarching aesthetic of the museum.

  Jackson’s work, as he understood it, was in many ways made possible by the machine age. In a 1935 article on “Benign Laryngeal Lesions,” Jackson attributes the modern diseases of the throat he encounters in his practice to “the noise incidental to our modern life.” The machine age is bound to cause voicelessness, it seems: “To talk in a subway train is utter ruin to the larynx,” Jackson warns; “railroad trains, omnibuses or automobiles are almost as bad. Certainly to converse in the average city street involves abuse of the larynx.” Over and against and in addition to these problems, women (and men) came to his practice beset by hardware. In a 1928 article for Grit, a photo of a pile of washers, nails, nuts, bolts, and screws forms a lurid mass atop the caption “‘Junk’ Sidney Barne Had in His Stomach 27 Years.” We don’t learn if Sidney Barne’s ingested hardware was a work hazard or if he can join the ranks of the women who swallowed hardware on purpose. A headshot of him staring up at a ceiling simply informs us, “And Here is Mr. Barne Himself.”

  Cases of purposeful swallowing in Jacksonian archives maintain an aura of sadness and distress. As in the case of Mrs. Nannie T.W. of Richmond, Virginia, who, at the age of forty-nine in 1927, attempted suicide by swallowing hairpins. The case study cites the woman’s husband’s death as the cause of her despondency and depression, and notes earlier attempts either to starve herself or to harm herself: “ate some glass with no harmful after-effects,” “X-ray was taken and revealed a penny in the stomach . . . which patient states she swallowed one week ago.” Examination is difficult due to the “highly nervous state of the patient,” and though a “Dr. Royster closely questioned pt.,” she “refused to answer.”

  Alongside Mrs. W., we could place nineteen-year-old Anna M. of Utica, New York, who, more dramatically and symbolically, swallowed a crucifix with several beads attached to a rosary chain, which lodged in her cervical esophagus. Endoscopy exacts a removal of the Thing but fails to help her otherwise, describing her as “apparently mentally unstable,” hailing from a history of familial insanity, presenting with teeth that are stained and bloody, and needing to be subdued with morphine owing to her becoming “violently insane” following the removal of the foreign body: “She attempted to injure the nurse and scratched her severely.” Like Mrs. W., Anna M. “will make no attempt to answer questions or to speak.” The coincidence of purposeful swallowing with the loss of voice, in the figurative and not just the literal sense, in the willful and not the accidental sense, is a reminder of hysteria’s (mis)use of the body to say what can otherwise not be said.

  Let us take stock: what we need to understand about hysterical swallowers is that they are not eating hardware, they are swallowing hardware—they have separated out one function from another. I need to be able to swallow in order to eat, but not all swallowing is in the service of eating. There are numerous ways to understand what is happening here, none of which is equivalent with the other: a bodily function that is usually integrated is cut off; something reserved for one function is pressed into the service of another and becomes exaggerated or takes on hyperbolic significance. Even to begin to render the hardware gobbler intelligible, we need to be able to acknowledge forms of ingestion that don’t have digestion in mind, forms of inhalation that don’t have breathing in mind, forms of intake that don’t have incorporation in mind, or those instances where mouthing becomes more important to the organism than eating. Take, for example, smoking—we enjoy inhaling something other than oxygen for its pleasurable effects—chewing gum, or sucking tobacco. We swallow a great many things in the course of a day, week, or month without eating those things and with more or less thought involved in the process—consider saliva, phlegm, or cum. We have trouble understanding why someone would ingest hardware, but we name dishes on diner menus “The Kitchen Sink.” (Stranger yet, we live in
an era of vomit- and booger-flavored jelly beans—call it Harry Potter product placement.)

  To perfect one’s ability to swallow without eating is to make oneself independent of the world outside of one: it’s as though the hardware needs the person, or at least the body—the gullet that can withstand it or the stomach that can contain it—more than the body needs the hardware, in the way that a person needs food in order to live. A hysterical swallower doesn’t need hardware in order to live, but she needs it in order to desire. In which case, her existence depends upon it.

  A student of mine once wrote a fascinating essay on the array of mustaches a man could sport, the many ways in which a mustache could change a man’s face and even signal a repertoire of manly types. Not until I heard the student read the essay in public did I notice that when she referred to facial hair on a man, she spoke of his “mouth” (“mustache” and “mouth” must be etymologically related), but when she referred to facial hair on women, she used the word “lips” (the phrases “hairy lip” and “lip mop” were especially prominent). Mouths and lips are definitely not the same, and it occurred to me that the student was onto something, some taken-for-granted insight about the gendering of orifices, some illumination of the matter of what bodies we’re allowed by virtue of the bifurcated genders we’re ascribed.

  To insist on differences between men and women usually does no favors to either sex. Still, I wondered if it were possible that, culturally speaking, men had mouths and women had lips. Where lips emit and perform, mouths desire, grasp, and get. Mouths swallow, whereas lips blow, as in “Put your lips together and . . .” To mouth words might mean to say them without meaning them, but mouths are more about the fulfillment of desire than are lips. Lips pay lip service. Lips kiss, curl upward, or frown. Women’s genitals are thought of as lips—terminologically, the labia and the labile are liplike. Which doesn’t mean they are malleable or facile, though these words seem to be kin. Women’s lips are injected with silicone—the better to pleasure you with. To say “she has a mouth on her” is to imply an illicit relationship to language, as if a woman can only have a mouth when she’s saying something mean or dirty—in which case the mouth is very unladylike and does not become her.

  A truly masculine man’s lips are not supposed to purse (nor are they supposed to pout), but when men get clubby, behind closed doors, they can be femmie with each other in ways they’d never permit in public. This is how I imagine a glee club of ear, nose, and throat specialists preoccupied with asserting the manliness of their profession—their authorial protocol—at the same time that they cozied up to one another to sing pep-rally songs like a group of giggling girls. At their annual meetings, members of the Triological Society, aka the American Laryngological, Rhinological, and Otological Society, apparently crooned like barbershop quartets songs that they’d written in honor of Chevalier Jackson.

  Imagine the white-tie, black-tail gathering at which John Finch Barnhill proclaimed his “Introduction of the Living Ex-Presidents of the American Laryngological, Rhinological and Otological Society.” He presented Jackson with the following bit of doggerel, recited at a dinner in the honor of ex-presidents at the Hotel Raleigh, Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1928:

  Chev. Jackson’s is a name on which

  It’s easy to make verse,

  Because the name has spread around

  The entire universe.

  In America or Europe,

  In Australia or Cathay

  All foreign bodies are removed The à la Jackson way.

  Now Jack can slip a bronchoscope

  Into a bronchiole

  As deftly as an artisan

  Pounds sand into a hole;

  And can take out bits of hardware—

  Till the numbers mount and mount—

  As easy as a bride elect

  Can spend a bank account.

  It’s interesting that out of all the work that Jackson was known for—from tracheotomy to new diagnostic procedures, from lye legislation to the perfecting of the instrumentarium—the verse in his honor chooses to highlight a case like that of the unknown woman in the Glore display, a hysterical imbiber of vast amounts of hardware. Did Jackson even ever treat such a case as Mabel Wolf’s or Mrs. Pappas’s? It’s not clear that he did, but such examples seem to yield the greatest entertainment value for a group of doctors bent on securing medicine as a male domain. This isn’t high art, to be sure; it’s more like the fodder Freud so well exploited in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, because the poem certainly performs, in condensed fashion, a whole host of regressive fears and anxieties and even ventures its own interpretation of hysterical swallowing. By evoking the bride-elect’s spending capabilities, the verse likens the hysterical swallower to a hyperconsumer who will waste what her husband earns, squander what he banks, and accumulate hardware with the same fervor with which she spends coins.

  Lyrics from the 1911 Triological Songbook, from the society’s seventeenth annual meeting, held in Atlantic City, are even more elaborate in their misogyny. Someone hits middle C on a piano and the bright-faced singing physicians begin:

  Poor Mary was a sufferer,

  Poor Mary was insane.

  Poor Mary filled her lungs with things

  Which ne’er came up again.

  Poor Mary had a hankering

  For hardware on the brain,

  Poor Mary’s taste was queer....

  Chorus (after each verse):

  Smoothly, smoothly slips the tube in,

  Brightly, brightly burns the light,

  Quickly, quickly pass the forceps,

  When all is working right . . .

  Chevalier was called in haste

  Poor Mary to relieve.

  Soon he came with all his kit,

  Great wonders to achieve.

  The first assistant took her place,

  A stop watch on her sleeve,

  The time to ascertain.

  Down went the speculum,

  Down went the swab;

  Down went the bronchoscope,

  For Jack was on the job;

  Down went the forceps,

  Mary’s lungs to rob,

  Then down and down again ...

  Cheva-Cheva-Chevalier

  Cheva-Cheva-Chevalier,

  Cheva-Cheva-Chevalier,

  Your fame is marching on.

  Once again the hysteric serves as centerpiece to an evening’s entertainment just after cocktails and before dinner and cigars, during the party portion of a day spent delivering papers and discussing advances in the field. The woman hardware swallower is chosen over the scores of quirky, curious, strange, or stirringly oddball cases the songsters could have drawn from. The stopwatch really does bring home Taylorism and the factory context of such acts, the relation between Jackson’s methods and then-popular efficiency studies, measuring of workdays, and standardizing of time/output quotients. But the remainder of the song adds the creepy dimension of a male doctor inserting something into a woman for sport.

  How could Jackson have responded to these boys’ club cheers—he who was bullied for his outsider status for the better part of his childhood? He who in so many ways cut a figure of unmasculine manliness? Could he possibly have liked this form of adulation, or did he feel he was being made to participate in the kind of savage cheering—“Cheva-Cheva-Chevalier”—that he warned was ruining many a football fan’s voice in those days? I first encountered this song in the John Quincy Adams Library of Otolaryngology in Alexandria, Virginia, but a second, longer version came to light in the Smithsonian’s collection of Jacksoniana, which I only discovered because of Jackson’s handwritten instructions to turn the page over, as though he had anticipated a future reader and fellow appreciator of these lines, which are to be sung to the tune of “John Brown’s Body”:

  Down went a button first,

  Then down went a pin;

  Down went a peanut,

  Deftly breathèd in;

  Down wen
t a toothpick,

  Which somewhere else had been;

  And then down went a cent.

  So quickly slid the bronchoscope

  Deep into Mary’s lung

  At most but half a second passed

  Before the deed was done.

  And then in but a second more

  Strange things were on the run

  From Mary’s deepest depths.

  Up came the button first,

  Then up came the bone;

  Up came the pin again,

  Up came a stone.

  But, when he fished the toothpick out,

  Poor Mary gave a moan,

  Her dearest treasure gone.

  About the further course of things

  But little need be said;

  For Mary had a free movement

  And freely vomitèd

  Soon Mary had a hardware shop

  Around her in the bed,

  Nothing was left but gas.

  Final Chorus:

  Cheva-Cheva Chevalier

  Cheva-Cheva-Chevalier

  Cheva-Cheva-Chevalier

  Your fame is marching on.

  I’m struck by how this song explodes into a celebration of bodily effluvia (vomit and gas); how it pictures the woman as a kind of automaton or burping doll who coughs up all manner of stuff if handled and shook enough, if properly acted upon for a marveling audience’s delight. “Strange things were on the run / From Mary’s deepest depths”—that’s a suggestive line, but it might be more indicative of the psychic mayhem, the id-like upheaval, the competing thoughts and feelings that had run amok in the minds of the medical men who wrote and performed the song, than reflective in any significant way of what women who lunched on hardware were trying and failing to cope with.