he street eating a
plum, who, on being struck by a horse, suddenly started and swallowed
the seed of the fruit. After the accident he had little pain or
oppression, and no coughing, but twelve hours afterward he rejected the
seed in coughing.

A curious accident is that in which a foreign body thrown into the air
and caught in the mouth has caused immediate asphyxiation. Suetonius
transmits the history of a young man, a son of the Emperor Claudius,
who, in sport, threw a small pear into the air and caught it in his
mouth, and, as a consequence, was suffocated. Guattani cites a similar
instance of a man who threw up a chestnut, which, on being received in
the mouth, lodged in the air-passages; the man died on the nineteenth
day. Brodie reported the classic observation of the celebrated
engineer, Brunel, who swallowed a piece of money thrown into the air
and caught in his mouth. It fell into the open larynx, was inspired,
causing asphyxiation, but was removed by inversion of the man's body.

Sennert says that Pope Adrian IV died from the entrance of a fly into
his respiratory passages; and Remy and Gautier record instances of the
penetration of small fish into the trachea. There are, again,
instances of leeches in this location.

Occasionally the impaction of artificial teeth in the neighborhood of
the larynx has been unrecognized for many years. Lennox Browne reports
the history of a woman who was supposed to have either laryngeal
carcinoma or phthisis, but in whom he found, impacted in the larynx, a
plate with artificial teeth attached, which had remained in this
position twenty-two months unrecognized and unknown. The patient, when
questioned, remembered having been awakened in the night by a violent
attack of vomiting, and finding her teeth were missing assumed they
were thrown away with the ejections. From that time on she had suffered
pain and distress in breathing and swallowing, and became the subject
of progressive emaciation. After the removal of the impacted plate and
teeth she soon regained her health. Paget speaks of a gentleman who
for three months, unconsciously, carried at the base of the tongue and
epiglottis, very closely fitted to all the surface on which it rested,
a full set of lost teeth and gold palate-plate. From the symptoms and
history it was suspected that he had swallowed his set of false teeth,
but, in order to prevent his worrying, he was never informed of this
suspicion, and he never