Medicine: Kerchoo

“The thorax is first filled with air by a deep inspiration; the glottis is then closed. . . . When a sufficiently high intrapulmonic pressure is attained, the glottis opens and the sudden change in pressure causes a forcible expulsion of air.”

So runs a physiologist’s description of a sneeze. But such words pale before a sneeze’s peppery reality. Last week Professor Marshall Walker Jennison of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology took high-speed, stop-motion photographs of this complicated phenomenon. His findings: 1) every spasm expels thousands of droplets, 250th of an inch in diameter, heavy with millions of germs; 2) human “muzzle velocity” runs as high as 150 feet a second, nearly two miles a minute.