A shy, proud, slight (105 lb.) man, known professionally as Tom, is the owner of one of the strangest stomachs in existence. This stomach was the subject last week of a book (Human Gastric Function; Oxford University Press; $4.75), by Drs. Stewart Wolf and Harold G. Wolff of Manhattan's New York Hospital. Says famed Physiologist Walter B. Cannon in his foreword: "The functions of the stomach have never been investigated with the detailed care, the skill and ingenuity" that Drs. Wolf & Wolff display in their researches on Tom's stomach.
Abdominal Mouth. One day when Tom was nine years old his father brought home some hot chowder in a beer bucket. Thinking it was beer, Tom took a swig, burned his esophagus so badly that the doctors could not keep it open as it healed. So for 47 years Tom has fed himself through an opening surgeons made in his abdominal wall. He chews his food, then spits it into a funnel attached to a rubber tube which runs through the opening to his stomach. A sensitive, self-respecting little man, with a peppery Irish temper, Tom has kept "the way I feed" a secret from all but his closest friends.
Tom used to be shy even with doctors because, when he went to have the opening (medical name: stoma) treated, doctors appeared more interested in the stoma than in Tom. Once when a doctor left him for a moment to call in colleagues, Tom disappeared from the examining table. After that he would let doctors listen to his chest and look down his throat, but he would not let them look at his stoma nor peer through it at his stomach.
Reluctant Guinea Pig. Some of Tom's stomach lining protruded in a rosette around the stoma. To absorb this membrane's secretions and the occasional leakage from inside, Tom wore a gauze bandage between meals. Sometimes the bandage irritated the rosette and it bled a little. When Tom worked as a sewer laborer during the depression, the bleeding got so bad that he had to let a surgeon remove some of the bleeding tissue. The convalescence was long and Tom had to go on relief. This hurt his pride—he had always managed to support his family. So Drs. Wolf & Wolff asked Tom to better his lot and do medicine a service by taking a job as clean-up man in their laboratory and serving as an experimental subject. Tom was worried and broke, but it took four months to persuade him.
Once Tom took the job (in 1941), he uncomplainingly let the doctors do almost anything to him. His was a peculiar schedule: with or without breakfast, as the doctors prescribed, he lay all morning on the examining table, sometimes napped; in the afternoons he tidied up the laboratory and ran errands. Human Gastric Function reports what happened when Drs. Wolf & Wolff plied and prodded Tom's stomach with whiskey, glass rods, hot & cold water, mustard, drugs, air pumps. The book is a minute record of his stomach's color, secretion and activity when Tom felt relaxed and secure, when he was full, hungry, worried or angry. Some of Wolf & Wolff's findings: