The Art of Swallowing

Voluntarily and involuntarily, a man swallows hundreds of times a day, but the process is one of the many which doctors only inadequately understand. This hiatus in medical learning became a pressing problem to three surgeons at the University of California Medical School; they had a patient whose swallowing mechanisms had been paralyzed by a gunshot wound. A .38-cal. bullet had hit the man near the nose, injuring some of the nerves that control the muscles of the throat. In Annals of Surgery, Drs. Howard C. Naff-ziger, Cooper Davis and H. Glenn Bell describe how they went about their problem.

First they compared what happened when the patient tried to swallow with what happens when a normal person swallows. Because ordinary X-ray movies were too fast, the doctors slowed them down to 60 a second. They found out what they wanted to know: one reason their patient was choking was that he could not raise his Adam's apple. But how to get his swallowing mechanism working again?

There was no literature on the subject, so the doctors duplicated the trouble in three monkeys by cutting the same nerves. Then they worked out an operation on the monkeys that allowed them to eat again in comfort. Ready for the real test, the doctors took part of a muscle from the patient's neck and sewed it to his Adam's apple. This muscle normally helps control the tongue. But it worked; the patient could raise his Adam's apple. It was the first such operation, say the three surgeons, that has ever been performed.

Last week, the patient, 46, at work in a construction camp in Southern California, seemed to be enjoying his rough camp food.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.