'Swallow ...' tells story of a doc who retrieved foreign objects from patients

Amid the basketball-size cysts and stuffed colons at the Mutter Museum is a wooden cabinet that doesn't look like anything special, considering its shocking neighbors. Open its drawers and remain unawed; it's full of items like safety pins and buttons.

But what these innocuous yet gnarly items have in common is that they were swallowed by eventual patients of Chevalier Jackson, a physician who dedicated his life to extricating, and collected, the everyday knickknacks that have traveled down people's esophagi.

"The thing that distinguishes the [Foreign Body] Collection is we're not looking at human remains. It seems more innocent at first glance," said Mary Cappello, an English professor at the University of Rhode Island. "But then you realize it has everything to do with the body. It has this corporeal quality even though it's a collection of objects."

Cappello, who grew up in Darby, was named a Guggenheim Fellow earlier this month. She will be at Laurel Hill Cemetery tomorrow afternoon to talk about Jackson and her book Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them (The New Press, $27.95). Jackson himself was entombed at West Laurel Hill after his death in 1958 at age 93.

Jackson, described in an obituary as "one of the greatest laryngologists of all time," had tunnel vision when it came to extracting swallowed foreign bodies. He was obsessed with the idea and was good at it. People came from all over the world to be treated at his practice in Pittsburgh and, later, Philadelphia.

Jackson didn't require payment when it came to poorer clients, perhaps due to his lower-class background growing up near Pittsburgh. But although he didn't charge for his services, Jackson was compensated. He insisted on keeping every foreign object that he dislodged, going as far as to fight with a patient who requested the return of an ingested quarter.

"He took them because it came to represent his mastery in removing them," Cappello said. That wasn't the explanation Jackson gave. He said he collected them as a teaching tool, and he did donate the collection to the Mutter, on 22nd Street near Chestnut.

"But for me the argument doesn't hold up," Cappello said. "You can have one quarter, they're all the same, but he collected all 50 quarters [he extracted]. There's so much more going on in this obsessive relationship with the foreign objects. I think of this collection as his work of art."

This idea drew Cappello to the cabinet of curiosities in the first place - the poetry and the humanity contained in these everyday items. After reading Jackson's autobiography, Cappello set out to illuminate the people behind the safety pins. "It's just a trove of the social body of the lives of people," Cappello said about the collection. "I feel as if I opened a drawer. There's an endless tapping, and I've only uncovered part of the narrative."

Cappello referenced a woman named Margaret Derryberry, who receives a section in "Swallow." Before she died, she went looking for the hatpin she swallowed, and had been extracted by Jackson, 75 years before.

"You think about for any of us, the objects that constitute our lives are not just about possessions but keepsakes. They hold memories," Cappello said, adding that Derryberry was trying to recapture a feeling from her early life.

"There's more to meet the eye when it comes to these objects."

The same could be said for Cappello's interest in Jackson and the collection. She is a breast-cancer survivor, and part of her treatment included having a port inserted into her body for chemotherapy. "Once an object has been in somebody's body, it takes a different meaning," she said.

Cappello is also fascinated by the idea of awkwardness. She even wrote a collection of essays on the subject, Awkward: A Detour. What first struck her about the collection was the incongruity of seeing an inanimate object in the body. She referenced an X-ray she saw of a tiny pair of binoculars lodged in a patient's esophagus, and how out of place they looked.

Unlike many of the exhibits at the Mutter Museum, Jackson's offers little biographical information about his patients. Jackson often ignored the psychological aspects involved in ingestion of objects. Cappello is working with Mutter curator Anna Dhody to change that by refurbishing the cabinet and adding some of the tools Jackson designed, biographical information on some of his patients and audiovisual elements meant to enhance the Jackson experience.

"As a collection, it represents the vulnerability of human lives," Cappello said.

"It's a very visceral experience, but there's all these different folds of fascination. It ultimately points to genius."

West Laurel Hill Cemetery, 215 Belmont Ave., Bala Cynwyd, 3 p.m. tomorrow, free, 610-664-1591, forever-care.com.