Word: gullete
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...father of an Irish family on Staten Island carried home a beer bucket. His son Tom, 9, tried to sneak a quick swig, soon collapsed, unconscious. The bucket held scalding, near-boiling chowder, and the burn closed young Tom's gullet with scar tissue. Not a particle of food or a drop of liquid could pass through it into his stomach. So surgeons cut into his abdomen, made a hole in his stomach where they attached it to the muscle wall. For the rest of his life, Tom had to feed himself by chewing his food and spitting...
...turn of the century, such infants always died. Then came operations to allow feeding (usually by tube) through the abdominal wall into the stomach. Many victims struggled along for years with these makeshifts. About 20 years ago, surgeons got bolder, devised several operations to supply a missing stretch of gullet by stitching a piece of the child's gut in its place. Appallingly complex, these techniques often needed a series of operations spread over a period of years. They could be done only in major medical centers...
...operations have now been simplified, and they are being done in more and more hospitals, many in smaller cities. Example: Karen Lee Gordon, from Pana, Ill., went to St. Mary's Hospital in nearby Decatur (est. pop. 75,000) for five operations to correct a complicated no-gullet anomaly. Last week, out of the hospital in time for her fifth birthday, she was eating normally, tasting and swallowing food, for the first time in her life. She even had sausage for breakfast...
...Tommy Boston Jr. of Cartersville, Ga., was taken to St. Joseph's Infirmary in Atlanta, where Surgeon William A. Hopkins found that he had a short stub of gullet extending one-third the normal length down from his throat, then nothing. Dr. Hopkins led this stump out through a hole in the neck, so Tommy could get rid of saliva. For feeding, he ran a tube into the stomach. This worked well for six years, until Tommy was big enough to undergo the operation. Then Dr. Hopkins pushed the gullet stump back into place, stretched a piece of Tommy...
...retirement, Sir James Gordon Partridge Bisset sits in the lee of the longboat and spins a salty yarn of life in an oldtime square-rigger. On his first voyage, Bisset was seasick. The mate gave him an old-fashioned cure: a pannikin of sea water poured down his protesting gullet. Though he has never been seasick since, Commodore Bisset notes ruefully: "I have always hesitated to recommend this old-fashioned remedy to passengers in luxury liners." Another old remedy was devised for Bisset's dysentery. The captain's remedies were numbered, and No. 15 was for dysentery...