Hairballs
Although stomach acid can dissolve razor blades in a remarkably short time, human hair is tougher—almost impossible to break down. Possibly because of this resilience, hairballs taken from human stomachs are well-documented, both medically and visually. Did you know there is a National Hairball Awareness Day? Yes, on April 27. The National Museum of Health and Medicine has in its anatomical collection twenty-four veterinary and three human hairballs or “trichobezoars.” These two photos record the surgical removal of a trichobezoar from a human stomach.
Photo source: National Museum of Health and Medicine
The End
The yang to the yin of bizarre food yens (sorry) is the compulsion to stick strange objects into one’s own rectum. (I couldn’t help going here.) According to Cecil Adams in More of the Straight Dope, medical journals document an unending list of objects extracted by physicians:
- Edibles: vegetables are obvious favorites (especially zucchini and carrots—one was eleven inches long), but apples and turnips are included (providing an ironic response to dieticians’ constant injunctions to fill up on fruits and veggies); a hard-boiled egg and a frozen pig’s tail are also on the list
- Bottles (Mrs. Butterworth’s, Coke)
- Jars and cans (Vaseline, peanut butter, baby powder)
- Cooking and eating implements (tumblers and glasses, a plastic spatula, a teacup)
- Handles (from an ax and an umbrella—all eighteen inches of it)
- Household objects (a ball-point pen, an antenna rod, a suitcase key, a tobacco pouch, a pair of eyeglasses, a 150-watt light bulb, sewing needles)
- Sporting goods (baseballs, a sand-filled bicycle inner tube)
- Tools (a flashlight, an oilcan, a carborundum grindstone, seventy-two jeweler’s saws, and a 6- x 5-inch tool box)
- Other miscellany (a two-pound stone, a polyethylene waste trap from the U-bend of a sink). In 1955, a man inserted a six-inch paper tube into his rectum, dropped in a lighted firecracker, and blew a hole in his anterior rectal wall. He was diagnosed with depression.
