Tom Little, an Irish American laborer who ate his meals by chewing food and spitting it into a funnel that fed into his stomach. When he was nine years old, in 1895, Tom swallowed a draught of clam chowder without letting it cool. The burn healed with strictures that fused the walls of his esophagus. Surgeons created a fistulous opening to his stomach so he could eat—or “feed,” as Tom now referred to the act of taking in sustenance. It was an undiminishing source of embarrassment. (Interestingly, his doctor noted in a book about the case, Tom “blushed both in his face and his gastric mucosa.”)
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