Singular Case of Foreign Substances in the Intestinal Canal.
By D. Hayes Agnew, M. D., Philadelphia.
The following case I am induced to report from its very sin-
gular character:—On examining the body of an individual who,
I believe, labored under some mental alienation during life, my
attention was attracted to an adhesion between the parietal and
visceral layer of peritoneum over the coecum, upon the separation
of which a small opening was perceived through the walls of the
intestine, disclosing a dark-looking substance, which, upon ex-
amination, proved to be a large mass of straw, little less than
an ordinary sized fist, and firmly impacted in all the space below ’
the ileo-ccecal valve. Noticing the transverse colon very much
distended, an incision was made into its cavity, where were found
a pair of suspenders, three rollers, and a quantity of thread,
interwoven with one another. The webbing, which evidently
was his suspenders, exceeded one and a quarter inches in
breadth, anl must be several feet in length, inasmuch as it ex-
tended through the ascending, transverse, and a portion of the
descending colon, and doubled in several places upon itself.
The rollers wrere of ordinary muslin, over one inch in width and
the same in diameter, but which must have been of much greater
size when swallowed, as they had, in their progress along the
intestines, become unrolled, leaving long ends which were en-
cased within layers of fseculent matter. The peritonitis, which
no doubt had been the principal cause of death, was not, how-
ever, produced by the escape of any intestinal matter into the
serous cavity, no such discharge having occurred. The opening
into the coecum only presented itself after the reflected layer of
the peritoneum was separated therefrom. Had life been pro-
longed, it is highly probable that the ulceration would have ex-
tended through the walls of the abdomen, and the coecal contents
passed out by this artificial route.