Word: eller
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...stricken woman was a victim of "food inhalation," an often fatal accident that is so often misdiagnosed as a heart attack that it has come to be called the café coronary. Partly as a result of these incorrect diagnoses, Florida Physicians WilLiam C. Eller and Roger K. Haugen report in the New England Journal of Medicine, choking on food is the sixth leading cause of accidental death in the country. Because, according to the National Safety Council, nearly 2,500 persons die while dining each year, the café coronary outranks aircraft accidents, firearms, lightning and snakebite...
...chief medical examiner; it accounts for some 90% of the fatalities. Other killers are lobster tail, hard-boiled eggs, clams, sausage, turkey and even bread. The sheer volume of the fatal mouthful is often breathtakingly large: the average chunk of food extracted from the windpipe of victims, Eller and Haugen say, is about the size of a cigarette pack; in one case, they report, the piece was over 7 in. long. The temptation to swallow such unmanageable amounts seems to be greatest among those with poor teeth or dentures, although a few drinks make eaters of any age more careless...
Choke Saver. Food inhalation has been a killer for centuries-all the more reason, Eller and Haugen say, for modern doctors to be familiar with the symptoms. A son of the Roman Emperor Claudius I is said to have choked to death on a pear he tossed playfully into the air and then swallowed. More recently, Mrs. Joan Skakel, Ethel Kennedy's sister-in-law, died after inhaling a chunk of meat in 1967. T.V. Soong, the brother of Madame Chiang Kaishek, choked to death in 1971 while dining, as did ex-Baseball Slugger Jimmy Foxx...
...Eller and Haugen estimate that 90% of dinner-table fatalities could be prevented, if doctors and laymen alike would not immediately assume that the victim is suffering from coronary thrombosis. The combination of eating and the inability to talk or breathe is a sure tipoff, they say; a genuine heart attack victim can usually speak. Backslapping is a waste of time, unless the victim is upside down, and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation is like "trying to pour water into a corked bottle." The food must be retrieved-with fingers or, if necessary, with a pair of tweezers. After a year...
...black thunderbolt streaking at a rate of 9.3 sec. per 100 yds. down a football field. Or about Dick Butkus, that splendid savage of a middle linebacker, actually biting an opponent's nose during a pileup. Or about four massive linemen in purple shirts named Eller, Page, Larsen and Marshall, holding off the mighty Los Angeles Rams three times from the two-yard line. Or about Running Back Gale Sayers, a Homeric combination of speed and skill and strength and courage, with only a wrecked knee (to mix a metaphor) as his Achilles heel...