Word: esophagus
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...wife kissed him in tearful "farewell" before the carette was hidden in the corner of the prison yard. Doctors who examined him later did not find the "gaffs." An old carny hand had taught Houdini the trick of retroperistal-sis-swallowing small objects, stopping them halfway down the esophagus and spitting them up at leisure...
From Illinois and Georgia last week came case histories of surgery's triumph over one of nature's malign quirks that was once invariably fatal, then permanently crippling. The anomaly: a baby, healthy-looking at birth, may prove to have no gullet (esophagus) to carry food from mouth to stomach. Sometimes there is a short, dead-end stretch of gullet at both top and bottom, but the middle section is missing. Often there is an opening between the defective gullet and the windpipe, so that air goes into the stomach and food into the lungs. Exact incidence...
...home Andy began to feel ill, took a cola drink and milk to ease the pain. They only made it worse. He called his family physician, who knew Andy's occupation. A barium X ray confirmed his diagnosis: Andy had punched a hole through his esophagus (gullet), narrowly missed his heart. His drinks were spilling through the hole into his chest cavity. The doctor called Surgeon Philip Thorek, an amateur movie fan who is careful to take a camera crew with him on unusual cases...
...when he got the call to operate on Andy. The resulting films showed the X ray and progress of the operation. Under general anesthesia he cut out Andy's fifth rib, pumped out the milk and cola, worked around the heart to get at the esophagus. Then he sewed up the hole. Andy's recovery was complicated by infection in the chest cavity, but antibiotics took care of that...
...drink heated up my esophagus, and I launched fearlessly into the interview...