Medicine: Hiccoughs

For 59 days one Vera Stone, 18, Tennessee girl, hiccoughed. She acked, eked, icked, ooked, ucked until she nearly died. Her diaphragm jerked until it ached and her arms and hands went numb. Doctors at Ripley, her home, and Memphis, where she was hospitalized, sought causes—irritation of the stomach’s mucous membranes, affection of the phrenic (diaphragm) nerve, peritonitis, sleeping sickness (encephalitis lethargica), methyl chloride escaping from a mechanical refrigerator. None of these were causative. They made her gulp cold water and hold her breath. That usually stops hiccoughs, but not Vera Stone’s.

Last week one shrewd doctor decided that she had hiccoughed so long she had forgotten what it was like not to hiccough, was therefore psychologically incapable of helping herself. He gave her a strong, nauseating drug, put her to sleep. When she awoke her mind was so occupied with her new, counter-irritating misery that she forgot to hiccough, was cured.

Because hiccoughing is an involuntary interruption of regular breathing, its victims seem comic to beholders and auditors. Sometimes the victim gets fun out of the experience, as in the story told about Actress Beatrice Lillie, last year at the gambling casino of Juan-les-Pins. When she sat down at a chemin de fer table, she began to hiccough, loudly. Before she could stop the croupier impassively shoved 150,000 francs to her. He thought that she had been barking “Banco.”

Hiccoughing is practically the reverse of coughing. Like speaking, singing, sneezing, sniffing, sighing, laughing, crying, sobbing, yawning, snoring, barking, it is a modification of breathing.

Hiccough is produced by spasms of the diaphragm and simultaneous closing of the vocal apparatus, the glottis, in the larynx. As breath is sucked into the lungs, it breaks through the closed glottis and produces the queer sounds of hiccough.