A strange thing it is, this human stomach.

Strange, how much toil it endures: how many and varied are the foods that enter it — foods so often badly cooked, hastily eaten, and not easily digested. And strange, how many foreign bodies it holds, from time to time...

A few weeks ago we read of a workman from whose stomach the surgeon removed a key twelve centimeters long, a steel awl, a rubber spring, and a bicycle bar... When the workman came round from his unconsciousness and the surgeon showed him the list of the findings, the workman answered absently: "I am afraid you did not manage to get everything out!"

The records of medicine are filled with what surgeons extract from time to time from patients' stomachs: coins, pins, needles, toys, spoons, glasses, razor blades, chains, keys, fish, and more besides.

The question that comes to mind is: why do these things, which cannot be chewed, reach the stomach — the stomachs of a good number of people every year?

The first cause: negligence and lack of care. Recently a baker was fined because he baked a loaf inside which a razor blade was found, and on the very same day another man was sentenced because a large nail was found in a cake he had baked.

What people swallow most often are fish bones — and that is natural. As for children, they will swallow, if they can, everything their little hands can reach — which leads to a number of illnesses and troubles, for them and for their families. It is therefore the duty of parents to take every care that nothing be within the child's reach that ought not to be put in the mouth. Among other things, all the toys and objects around them should be so large in size that they cannot enter the mouth, or, if they