<DIV>One of the most popular attractions in the Mütter Museum, the world-famous medical museum in Philadelphia, is the Chevalier Jackson Foreign Body Collection: a beguiling set of drawers filled with thousands of items that had been swallowed or inhaled (both by accident and deliberately), including a crucifix, hundreds of safety pins, a toy goat, a padlock, and a "Perfect Attendance" pin. Combining original research with a sympathetic and evocative sensibility, writer Mary Cappello restores the narratives, lives, and desires of the physician-artist Dr. Chevalier Jackson and his patients haunting this uncanny collection, uncovering a history of racism and violence, of forced ingestion and "hysteria," of class and poverty that left children to bank their family's last quarters in their mouths. She brings her original sensibility to bear on Jackson's 1938 autobiography as she highlights the achievements of this activist-inventor, probes his traumatic childhood, and brilliantly retells a life story rife with marvelous forms of rescue. <BR><BR>As with Lawrence Weschler's <I>Dr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonders</I>, in <I>Swallow</I> a collection of objects forms a surprising narrative that journeys deep into the nature of human experience. A literary and psychological exploration, the book seeks to understand rather than gawk at sword swallowers, women who lunched on hardware, and a boy who wasn't saved because he wasn't believed. Cappello invites us to enter the seat of human appetite, language, aggression, breath, and even knowledge—the human mouth—in an original and creative tour de force.</DIV>