Voluntarily and involuntarily, a man swallows hundreds of times a day, but the process is one of the many which doctors only inadequately understand. This hiatus in medical learning became a pressing problem to three surgeons at the University of California Medical School; they had a patient whose swallowing mechanisms had been paralyzed by a gunshot wound. A .38-cal. bullet had hit the man near the nose, injuring some of the nerves that control the muscles of the throat. In Annals of Surgery, Drs. Howard C. Naff-ziger, Cooper Davis and H. Glenn Bell describe how they went about their problem.
First they...