Launched at Philadelphia's Mütter Museum to warm reviews and coverage in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal , Swallow is a beguiling and deeply rewarding exploration of the museum's Chevalier Jackson Foreign Body Collection, a set of drawers filled with thousands of items that had been swallowed or inhaled. It is also a quirky portrait of Dr. Chevalier Jackson, the pioneering laryngologist who extracted those items nonsurgically, using rigid instruments of his own design, and of the act of swallowing itself. Animating the space between interest and terror, curiosity and dread, award winning author Mary Cappello explores what seems beyond understanding: the physiology of the human swallow, and the poignant and baffling psychology that compels people to ingest non-nutritive things. Cappello uncovers 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. Here, the seemingly disparate but equally marvelous worlds of the circus and the medical amphitheater meet in characters ranging from sword swallowers and women who lunched on hardware to the sensitive, bullied boy who grew up to be the father of endoscopy.