Garlic Breath

Last year Physiologist Howard Wilcox Haggard of Yale announced that onion or garlic breath "arises solely from particles retained in the structures of the mouth," could be cured instantly by chloramine, a mouthwash containing chlorine (TIME, July 1, 1935). Last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association two other investigators flatly contradicted Dr. Haggard with a report indicating that the only way to escape onion or garlic breath is to abstain from eating onions or garlic.

Professor Marion Arthur Blankenhorn and Dr. Calvus Elton Richards, both of Cincinnati's General Hospital, were convinced that, when eaten, the essential oils of onion and garlic pass into the blood, are aerated into the lungs and from there breathed out. In proof, they offered the results of an experiment on a patient whose mouth was blocked off from his stomach by a cancer of the esophagus, who could receive nourishment only through a tube in the abdominal wall. Through this tube the experimenters introduced garlic soup. Three hours later the patient's breath began to smell, continued to do so for twelve hours. In this case the pungent food was never in the mouth at all.

Another subject could eat normally, but his respiratory tract had been disconnected from his throat because of laryngeal cancer. This patient's breath was inhaled and exhaled through a tube inserted in the windpipe. Three hours after he ate salad garnished with onion and garlic, the air exhaled through the tube became malodorous. In this instance the breath had no contact with the mouth, throat, esophagus or stomach, must therefore have picked up the contamination in the lungs. Unwilling to trust their own sense of smell entirely, Drs. Blankenhorn & Richards called in technicians, hospital internes and residents who had no idea what the experiments were designed to prove. None of these observers had any difficulty identifying the subjects' breaths as garlic-laden.

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