Medicine: Tonics & Sedatives

At Elizabeth City, N. C., happened an accident, result of a practical joke, the account of which in the local newspaper was so quaint that the Journal of the American Medical Association reprinted it last week among its

“Tonics & Sedatives.”* The reprinted account:

“IRVIN NIXON’S INSIDES ARE ALL STILL THERE—

Hertford Youth Survives Blast of Air That Nearly Tore His Insides Out—

Irvin Nixon, the 15-year-old Hertford youth, victim of a ghastly practical joke which nearly cost him his life, was released from the Elizabeth City Hospital Sunday morning. Young Nixon was brought to the hospital last week in a frightful condition from the effects of a blast of air from a powerful air compressor injected into his interior by a playmate. The nozzle of the air hose was thrust into the posterior of the youth and the air blast literally blew the contents of his bowels up and through his mouth and nostrils. He was brought to the hospital with his intestines inflated and paralyzed. . . .”

The American Medical Association Journal’s comment to this was: “A Terrible Blow to Irvin.”

*The “joke” department of the Journal. Its anecdotes, puns, poems, “miscellany, ” all occasionally rabelaisian, disclose one of a doctor’s interestswhIch his patients rarely discern.