People Swallow The Darndest Things: Cigarette Butts, Burnt Matches And More

A museum exhibit at the Mütter Museum of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia is pretty strange even by wacko museum standards. It documents the things that people have swallowed—the number is in the thousands by the way—as collected by Chevalier Jackson, a pioneering laryngologist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Jackson developed techniques to safely remove the crazy objects that people swallowed and saved thousands of lives while doing it. Amazingly, Jackson kept every swallowed object. So very fascinating.

If you want to learn more about the backstory about the people who swallowed and the master doctor, a book by Mary Capello, ‘Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them’, takes a look at those crazy times. [Swallow via AOL News]