Punishment

The 25-year-old veteran was lifting a packing box when he suddenly felt everything "let loose" in his stomach. When he lay down he didn't feel so bad, but the minute he stood up, the old feeling came back. At the Chicago hospital, he complained of severe, knifelike pains in the abdomen.

When the doctors operated for what they felt certain was complicated umbilical hernia, they were amazed to find that the patient's self-diagnosis of "knifelike" pains had been literally accurate: there was actually a nine-inch table knife in his sigmoid. the curve of the intestine leading to the rectum.

Just how much of this kind of punishment can the human intestine stand? Quite a lot, according to Drs. Arkell M. Vaughn and James A. Martin, who have just spent a good bit of time poring over medical literature and have reported their findings to the Journal of the American Medical Association. A few "foreign bodies" that have accidentally or deliberately been "introduced" into the long-suffering human intestine:

A 4-by-2 1/2-inch water glass, a 40-watt light bulb, a snuff box, a fish hook, ink bottles, a lemon, an apple, ox horns, chicken bones, a frozen pig's tail, a cold cream jar, whiskey glasses, an iron rod.

Most unlikely case: the convict who concealed, in his colon, "a tool box containing a piece of gun barrel, a screw driver, two hack saws, a boring syringe, a file, several coins, thread and tallow." Instead of hacking or boring his way to freedom, the ingenious convict escaped his cell by dying of bowel obstruction.

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