Swallow: Foreign Bodies & the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them by Mary Cappello

Author:Mary Cappello
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 1595583955
Publisher: New Press, The
Published: 2010-12-28T06:00:00+00:00

Recently, a man in the Urals, complaining of a pain in his chest, was discovered to have a tiny fir tree growing in his lung. Complete with needles but devoid of sun. Had the man, snoring during a midday nap, inhaled a seed as it fell from a tree? The fear this tale—tall or short—taps into is of that which grows inside of us, is always growing inside of us. Is it death? But the beauty of it and the chill of it is its entwining—when the fir tree comes to be inextricable with its host, like a Hawthorne character’s birthmark. The power of the alien thing taking root within us.

It has been said that poets are people who love the names of things. In the realm of medicine, to name something is to begin to know it, but also, in various crucial ways, to be done with it. The Greek suffix “-phagy” in particular takes us into relatively unspeakable realms. Take “placentophagy,” the practice of eating the placenta following childbirth, where the afterbirth is understood to be a double of the fetus, a highly nutritive life support that had performed all of the major organ functions for the fetus before birth, a substance that is to be treated with awe and with reverence, thus leading to some people’s ritual consumption of it. Or “polyphagi,” the word for a glutton or a person who overeats for sport, or who is compelled by others who need to watch a person eat to excess for their own amusement. “Polyphagi” are perfect contenders for fbdy-discourses-as-pornographic-compendia, accounts in which the writer seems to take as much relish in reporting on the phenomena as the glutton’s audience was amused and disgusted by it.

Pagophagia : excessive eating of freezer frost. Acuphagia : swallowing sharp objects. Amylophagia : ingesting laundry starch. Cautopyreiophagia: doing the same with burnt matches. Coprophagia, feces; foliophagia, leaves, grass, acorns, pinecones; geomelophagia, raw potatoes; geophagia, dirt, sand, clay; lignophagia, wood, bark, twigs; lithophagia, rocks, gravel, pebbles; trichophagia, hair. All of these neologisms were invented to exemplify a more global diagnostic term for a form of disordered eating called pica.

Pica refers etymologically to a genus of magpies, birds known for their insatiable or indiscriminate appetite. From the sixteenth century onward, it has been used to refer to “disordinate longing,” “deprav’d” or “perverted” appetite, “untoward hankerings of nature,” “morbid craving,” and “desire for innutritious substances.” Because there is no definitive etiology for pica, the term is relatively useless, but, as we can see, it has generated a boundless set of companionate lingo. It can afflict pregnant women, autistic individuals, people with developmental disabilities, psychotic patients, prison inmates, and people suffering from nutritional deficiencies, which are hardly groups in common. Best of all, as Lillian N. Stiegler points out in “Understanding Pica Behavior,” “many individuals with normal intellect report that they engage in pica simply because they take pleasure in the texture, smell and/or taste of the items they ingest.”

Pica appears to be a bona fide

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