Pouched Throats

A clique of thieves in India have in their throats pouches in which they hide small but precious loot. Pressed into military service, such pouched thieves serve as carriers of small documents. They develop their throat pouches by partially swallowing a pellet tied to a string. The training begins in childhood, continues for years with a bigger and bigger pellet, until a useful pouch takes shape.

Honest people sometimes develop throat pouches. The gullet muscles weaken, sag. Such diverticula may be very annoying. They interfere with eating. Food catches in them like waste in the trap of a sink, ferments and sends up fetid odors.

Last week colleagues of that Philadelphia ornament of the profession. Dr. Chevalier Jackson, disclosed that by means of his esophagoscope he has developed an efficacious technique for closing such pouches in honest man or thief at one sitting.

The esophagoscope, like Dr. Jackson's famed bronchoscope, is essentially a narrow-bored tube. The bronchoscope goes down the windpipe into the lungs. The esophagoscope goes down the gullet. Dr. Jackson developed both after he got the initial idea from two German professors. They derived their method from sword-swallowers. Jugglers learned long, long ago that by throwing their heads far back and depressing their tongues, their opened mouths were brought into a direct line with their straightened gullets. By getting his patients to do the same, the late Dr. Alfred Kirstein found that he could see far down the throat with a small headlight. That was in 1894. Three years later Dr. Gustav Killian succeeded in safely running a metal tube into a patient's lung and peering down the bore. Just as Elias Howe perfected the sewing machine by putting the hole at the front end of the needle, Dr. Jackson simplified throat and chest investigations by putting a tiny electric light at the front end of the tube which he saw Dr. Killian demonstrate in Philadelphia. Thus he could clearly see the smallest details of dark recesses, and reproduce them in drawings of exquisite details. (He is notably skillful at freehand drawing.) If he could see into a windpipe, lung or gullet, why not reach into them-- remove foreign bodies, perform small operations? It was only necessary to invent forceps, pincers, clamps, scissors, knives small enough to slip through the tubes. They must be operated by long, slender The University of Pennsylvania created a Chevalier Jackson Bronchoscopic Clinic for him. There he has taught to hundreds of graduate doctors, among them his son & assistant Dr. Chevalier Lawrence Jackson, the technique of removing growths and obstructions from the mouth, gullet and windpipe. There he taught them that for which the ordinary citizen knows him best--the removal from the lungs of tacks, pins, grains, teeth, bones and other knicknacks. And, although his former students are established with their instruments in all parts of the country, it is to Dr. Jackson himself that many a parent brings the child who is choking on a safety pin or whatnot. But Dr. Jackson is no longer at the Chevalier Jackson Bronchoscopic Clinic of the University of Pennsylvania, with its children's rooms decorated like nurseries. Two years ago he resigned to develop a similar clinic for booming Temple University School of Medicine, also in Philadelphia. Nonetheless, he continues to give some graduate instruction at the older University.

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