Record for Britain

On the night of May 7, 14-year-old Michael Hippisley popped dutifully into his bed at the Stowe School, Buckingham, England. A moment later he began to sneeze. Within an hour his sleepless dormitory mates had counted 1,200 kerchoos; they estimated that he continued to sneeze every three seconds for the rest of the night.

Next day Michael Hippisley, a hay-fever victim, who had injections for hay-fever last winter, was bundled off to the infirmary. When his sneezes showed no sign of letting up, alarmed school authorities sent him home to London. His parents called in, one after the other, two general practitioners, a hay-fever specialist, an otolaryngologist, a chiropractor and a hypnotist.

The experts gave Michael adrenaline packs, calcium muscular injections, diathermy; they stuffed paraffin up his nose, cauterized his nasal membranes, gave him nose & ear drops, hundreds of tablets. Chiropractor Lester Jelfs, who attributed the sneezing to a "nerve impingement" in Michael's spine, managed to reduce the sneezes to a mere 240 per hour by vigorous adjustment. But Michael had hardly left the chiropractor's office before the sneeze rate soared again. Hypnotist Norman Waters sent Michael into a deep trance and intoned: "You are not going to sneeze. When I snap my fingers you will wake up and tell your mother, 'I have stopped sneezing.' " Waters snapped his fingers and Michael woke with a violent kerchoo.

When newspapers carried pictures of Michael's paroxysms, concerned Britons swamped the Hippisleys with hundreds of phone calls and letters offering home remedies, none of which worked.*

By last week, Michael had sneezed more than 150,000 times. His parents and doctors decided that the publicity and excitement resulting from setting the British sneezing record (the American record is probably held by a 13-year-old girl, Mary Margaret Cleer, who in 1936 sneezed for 57 days) was not helping Michael's recovery; they shipped him off to the country. His grandmother took him to a cold storage plant, where he sat in a room with the temperature at 18DEG below zero. When he came out, he was shivering, and sneezing.

At week's end, Michael was weary and his stomach muscles were sore, but otherwise he was in good health and was sneezing only once every eight seconds.

* Sneezing, like hiccups, warts and baldness, is richly endowed with popular superstitions and remedies. Aristotle considered a sneeze evidence of the brain's vigor. Ancient Persians believed it to be the draft from the Evil One's wings. Hindus think a sneezer is expelling an evil spirit. Old wives' cures include pulling hairs from the nose, reciting the alphabet backwards, shooting off a revolver.

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