Alyssa Pelish writes about the difficult cases handled by the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). Pelish’s essay, called “The Bureau of Hards“, appears in the Fence blog. Close attention is paid there to a modest experiment: Indeed, an experiment run in 2000 by a group affiliated with the eccentrics behind the annual Ig Nobel Prize found that […]
Barry Petchevsky performed his annual data-gathering exercise “What Did We Get Stuck In Our Rectums Last Year?” in Deadspin: All reports are taken from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s database of emergency room visits, and they are occasionally not for the faint of spirit…. GOLF BALL PEANUT BUTTER JAR SPRAY BOTTLE CURTAIN ROD “STUCK A TOY UP […]
What do doctors do when they find a needle in a patient’s rectum? A research study explores that very question, and we explore that study, in this week’s Improbable Research podcast. SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free. This week, Marc Abrahams discusses a published oh-look-there’s-a-needle-in-this-patient’s-rectum study. Yale/MIT/Harvard biomedical researcher Chris Cotsapas lends his voice, and his scientific expertise, and his opinions —with dramatic readings from a research […]
What’s the deal with people who yearn to eat or to be eaten — to literally consume, or to literally be consumed — during sex. And what’s a good example of an early medical report about a pestle found in a rectum? Those questions are addressed in studies that are profiled (in the column “Boys Will Be Boys: […]
The Mutter Museum has, among its protected treasures, one of Philadelphia’s largest collections of swallowed (and eventually retrieved, by medical personnel) objects. (Thanks to Paige Williams for bringing this to our attention.) The museum explains: Chevalier Jackson Collection Chevalier Jackson, MD (1865-1958), was a renowned Philadelphia otolaryngologist and Fellow of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. […]
Thank you to the disturbingly many people who alerted us to this article in Deadspin: What Did We Get Stuck In Our Rectums This Year? As in past years, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has created a searchable database of emergency room visits around the country. And as in past years, we have trolled the data […]
The Simply Physics site collects images of things that flew at and into MRI machines, attracted magnetically: DANGER! Flying Objects! Once you’ve been in the MRI field for any length of time, you start hearing all of the various horror stories about thing that have flown into a scanner. Often, newcomers don’t take the real […]
A silicone oven mitt. (NOTE: The oven mitt described in the study was of more traditional design and construction.) When unusual objects turn up in awkward places, that’s not necessarily the end of the story. A doctor who succumbs to embarrassment or simple amusement — and fails to ask how those objects got there — […]
In 1995, the Ig Nobel Prize in literature was awarded to two surgeons who painstakingly assembled a study called Rectal Foreign Bodies: Case Reports and a Comprehensive Review of the World’s Literature. Those case reports involve, among other items: seven light bulbs; a knife sharpener; two flashlights; a wire spring; a snuff box; an oil […]