Capsules

> Because it happens so frequently, doctors rarely get overly excited when youngsters swallow coins, buttons or other foreign objects. But doctors at the Ohio State University Hospitals in Columbus were worried when an adult patient, almost helpless as a result of head injuries, swallowed a thermometer that had been placed in his mouth by a careless nurse's aide. They immediately put the patient on a low-roughage diet, and watched, by means of X rays, as the thermometer slowly made its way first into the stomach, then into the small intestine and finally into the large intestine. The doctors were prepared to remove the glass tube surgically if necessary. But 19 days later, the crisis--and the thermometer --passed. Most of the doctors' colleagues applauded their patience in delaying surgery. But some questioned their use of a low-roughage diet. According to Drs. Ernest Johnson and Watson Parker, a high-bulk diet, such as is often prescribed to cure constipation, may have proved more helpful in speeding the thermometer on its tortuous way.

> For more than a century, the oldest of wives' tales about oarsmen was that they died young--the all-out exertion of crew racing was too much for the overstrained heart. Although that belief was challenged as long ago as 1873 in a study of 294 British oarsmen, the myth has persisted--evidently because fiction is more fun than fact. Now Dr. Curtis Prout of the Harvard University Health Services has made an updated study and reports his findings in the current A.M.A. Journal. Prout selected 172 graduates of Harvard and Yale, all of whom had rowed at least once in the four-mile varsity race between 1882 and 1902; for each oarsman, a classmate was picked at random for comparison. Prout agrees that oarsmen seem to develop slow-beating "athlete's heart." But the oarsmen lived, on the average, at least six years longer. The 90 Harvard crewmen lived to an average age of 67.79 years, as against 61.54 for their nonrowing classmates, while the 82 Yale men did slightly better, living 67.91 years to their classmates' 61.56. Only half as many rowers died before age 60 as did nonrowers. Prout dramatized his thesis by digging up a picture of the Harvard junior varsity crew that won at Henley-on-Thames in 1914. He managed 50 years later to round up every one of them--including then Bow Oar Senator Leverett Saltonstall--and boated the whole crew in a shell on the same course. Incidentally, not one of them had developed an unmanageable paunch.

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