Word: gullet
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When Phillip was born in the West Texas town of Kermit (pop. 7,000), doctors soon saw that nature had made a series of deadly mistakes. Milk could not reach the baby's stomach, because his gullet came to a dead end in the upper chest. He had no anal opening (the lower colon wound itself into another dead end). Furthermore, both kidneys were on the right side, and one did not work. Surgeons at nearby Odessa made a temporary opening into Phillip's stomach so he could be fed, and another opening in the lower bowel...
...there, late last month, surgeons finished the job of correcting nature's errors. They freed Phillip's windpipe from a useless connection with his stomach, made a continuous passage from mouth, through throat and gullet, to stomach. After intravenous feeding during convalescence (and almost three years of being fed liquids through a tube), Phillip Culpepper demanded an egg. Last week he got it-fried, "over easy." Far from wealthy (her husband is a journeyman plumber), Mrs. Culpepper had gambled $1,000 in legal expenses and $2,000 in medical bills to give the boy a chance for normal...
...father of an Irish family on Staten Island carried home a beer bucket. His son Tom, 9, tried to sneak a quick swig, soon collapsed, unconscious. The bucket held scalding, near-boiling chowder, and the burn closed young Tom's gullet with scar tissue. Not a particle of food or a drop of liquid could pass through it into his stomach. So surgeons cut into his abdomen, made a hole in his stomach where they attached it to the muscle wall. For the rest of his life, Tom had to feed himself by chewing his food and spitting...
...Tommy Boston Jr. of Cartersville, Ga., was taken to St. Joseph's Infirmary in Atlanta, where Surgeon William A. Hopkins found that he had a short stub of gullet extending one-third the normal length down from his throat, then nothing. Dr. Hopkins led this stump out through a hole in the neck, so Tommy could get rid of saliva. For feeding, he ran a tube into the stomach. This worked well for six years, until Tommy was big enough to undergo the operation. Then Dr. Hopkins pushed the gullet stump back into place, stretched a piece of Tommy...
...retirement, Sir James Gordon Partridge Bisset sits in the lee of the longboat and spins a salty yarn of life in an oldtime square-rigger. On his first voyage, Bisset was seasick. The mate gave him an old-fashioned cure: a pannikin of sea water poured down his protesting gullet. Though he has never been seasick since, Commodore Bisset notes ruefully: "I have always hesitated to recommend this old-fashioned remedy to passengers in luxury liners." Another old remedy was devised for Bisset's dysentery. The captain's remedies were numbered, and No. 15 was for dysentery...