A whole lot of belly laughs

Siegfried Ernst Miederer has discovered an astonishing array of objects in his patients’ stomachs over his decades-long career. Indeed, some of his stories are so outlandish that you might find them a bit, well, hard to swallow.
For example, when examining one man, he found that he had swallowed a job lot of spoon handles.
He was a prison inmate and he hoped that an operation would give him a nice change from everyday prison life,” says Miederer, 74, an eminent gastroenteologist. 
The prisoner had broken the bowls off the spoons so that he could easier fit the handles down his oesophagus. 
“That was a minimum of two weeks in the hospital. He got away from the prison and relished the tender loving care of the female nurses.”
After the prisoner had enjoyed surgery on his stomach more than 20 times, Miederer decided to get the spoon handles out the way they came in and pulled them back up the oesophagus with an endoscope. That was so quick that the prisoner promptly lost interest in his game.
The handles now take pride of place in Miederer’s motley collection of swallowed objects, which includes fish skewers, buttons, coins and keys.
Miederer’s collection was made possible by medical advances in the 19th century, when the idea of examining a patient’s stomach via a long tube arose. Research in this area culminated in the 1958 unveiling of the first flexible endoscope.
Later, while at the University of Bonn in Germany, Miederer helped develop the first disinfection device for flexible endoscopes.
Today, the device is on show in the endoscopy section at a Bonn museum of technology – right next to a selection of “stomach finds” from Miederer’s collection.
“They are among our most popular exhibits,” director Andrea Niehaus of the Deutsches Museum says. “Visitors are always standing in front of them, sickened and amazed that people can swallow whole spoons and even a dentist’s drill.”
Each piece of belly bric-a-brac that Miederer has collected over the years has a story behind it.
The doctor recalls the time he removed a five-deutschmark coin from the stomach of a teacher’s son. The boy had accidentally swallowed it in the rough and tumble of play-fighting with his elder brother.
No sooner had Miederer removed the coin than the boy’s father snatched it out of his hand and put it in his pocket.
“I had to give him a fiver out of my own wallet before he’d give me the coin for my collection,” Miederer says.
Well, they do say that teachers’ salaries are difficult to stomach.