Mary Cappello’s fourth book is self-described as a work of ‘literary nonfiction’: a tag that barely seems to scratch at the surface of the author’s multi-disciplinary approach. The intimate anecdotal style, frequent departures into philosophical reflection and post-modern narrative combine to make a work as unorthodox as the collection (and, perhaps, the collector) it describes. Yet such a term also threatens to denigrate the work, hinting that it does not quite fit the bill for either field. Nonetheless, historians and literary critics alike should find much of interest here.

Part-biography, Swallow details the life and career of an American laryngologist, through a collection of objects housed in Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum: the Chevalier Jackson Foreign Body Collection. Jackson collected and stored over two thousand ‘fbdies’ (as he called them), leaving a legacy as contradictory as it is compelling. As Cappello notes, Jackson dedicated his life to convincing other doctors that ingested foreign bodies were commonplace: yet his collection is regularly interpreted as a curiosity, an assortment of strange and unusual surgical cases.

This contradiction forms the crux of Cappello’s analysis, as she delves into publications, letters, case notes and sketches in an effort to explain how such a collection came into being. Why were these objects collected? What significance did they hold to the man who collected them, and what other stories can they tell? The juxtaposition of commonplace to marvellous, medical to miraculous, is never far away; for example, it transpires that early endoscopists were inspired by the technique used by sword-swallowers: throwing back the head to create a straight channel down which an instrument might be passed. Cappello takes such analogy further, relating the sword-swallower’s mastery of the reflexes to the surgeon’s efforts to gain control of the body through an operation.

Yet Jackson’s collection, in which the objects are inserted into a system whereby they figure as ‘evidence of mastery and control’ (p. 106), highlights yet another issue, bringing us into the realm of psychobiography. What did these repeated efforts to tame the body mean for Chevalier Jackson himself? Cappello sees a puzzling contradiction between Jackson’s account of his life in his autobiography and his collection. The surgeon had a troubled childhood as a victim of severe bullying, making his later insistence that the presence of a foreign body was invariably the result of ‘carelessness’ surprising. Thus, Cappello suggests that a focus on the surgeon himself can mask other important issues raised by the collection: the acts of violence glimpsed in cases such as the nine-month-old baby, whose sister fed him four open safety pins, or Joseph B., force-fed over thirty objects by his babysitter.

Thus, in addition to relating the life of an innovative surgeon, Cappello also uses the Chevalier Jackson collection to explore the human dramas within the cabinet. What does it mean, she asks, to swallow something that is not food? What does the foreign body become, once it has been swallowed? What significance does it hold for the individual after its removal? In her analysis, Cappello deftly weaves anecdotal accounts – her own and those of others – into historical research. Correspondence from Margaret Derryberry, searching for a hatpin aspirated nearly eighty years before, provokes reflection on the way a foreign body might be absorbed into the individual, for Margaret still speaks of the pin as a part of her, telling Cappello that: ‘We’re in drawer number seventy’ (p. 200). There are occasional problems with this approach, most often in the author’s tendency to privilege psychoanalytic readings of objects and acts. This suggests that there is, somehow, a ‘real’ meaning to be uncovered behind the swallowing of foreign bodies, an idea which undermines some of the more complex questions asked: for instance, what does the foreign body suggest to us about the ways in which self-concepts are created and revised?

Thought-provoking, affecting and stimulating by turns, Swallow is a highly readable work. Nonetheless, Cappello’s eclectic style will take some getting used to for many historians. There is no linear story here: like the objects and cases she investigates, the book is fragmented into ideas, anecdotes, and episodes in Jackson’s life. Anyone wanting to use the volume to flick through Jackson’s life story, uncovering key dates and episodes, will be sadly frustrated in their search. Yet, Swallow raises many pertinent questions, and the reader who perseveres from cover to cover will be well rewarded.