Fiery Belch

He was a thin dyspeptic Londoner. One evening he and his wife attended a neighborhood cinema. As he took his seat, his foul breath caused others to jerk their heads away. He pretended not to notice, put a cigaret between his lips. Just as he brought the lighted match, carefully cupped in his hands, up to the cigaret, he emitted a mighty belch. There was a sudden flash of flame, a rumbling "poom," a smell of singed hair. The cigaret was projected by the explosion over three rows of seats. "In pain and confusion," declared the Lancet, British medical weekly, in reporting the case of this fiery belcher this month, "he had hurriedly to leave the cinema."

The explosion seared the fellow's lips and fingers, scorched his mustache. Such an unseemly performance in public caused him to seek medical attention and eventually to reach the hands of Dr. Charles Frederick Terrence East, one of the most ambitious as well as one of the most inquisitive of famed Harley Street's specialists.

Dr. East investigated. He found that a scar of an old ulcer partly blocked the passageway from his patient's stomach into his intestines. This stricture caused food to remain unduly long in the stomach. The food fermented and formed, along with non-inflammable carbon dioxide, highly inflammable methane (which miners know as fire damp and farmers as marsh gas) and inflammable hydrogen disulfide, the gas which makes rotten eggs smell as they do.

All the mouth washes in the world could not have made Dr. East's patient socially acceptable. Dr. East cured him by having the stricture which was causing the trouble cut out.

In reporting this rare case to the Lancet, Dr. East was moved to embellish his article with the following quotation from dyspeptic Alexander Pope:

Behold the stomach: crammed from every dish, The tomb of boiled and roast and flesh and fish, Where bile and wind, and phlegm and acid jar, And all the man is one intestine War!

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