“In my visits among my patients, one morning, I went into a room where two, who were acquaintances of each other, were accustomed to live: immediately I entered, I noticed an unusual degree of dejection about one of them, and a feverish kind of excitement in the other. I enquired what was the matter? ‘Matter!’ said the excited one, ‘matter enough! he has done for himself!’—‘Why? what has he done?’—‘Oh he has only swallowed the poker!’ During this short conversation the other looked increasingly mournful; and on my enquiring what was the matter with him, he replied, ‘He has told you true enough; I have swallowed the poker, and do not know what I shall do with it!’ ‘I will tell you how it happened,’ said the first. ‘My friend and I were sitting by the fire talking on different things, when I offered to lay him a wager that he could not eat any of the poker: he said he could and would; took it up, twisted the end of it backward and forward between the bars of the grate, and at last broke off some inches of it, and instantly swallowed it; and he has looked melancholy ever since.’ I did not believe,” said Dr. Fox, “a word of this tale; and I suppose the narrator guessed as much, for he added, ‘O, you can see that it is true, for there is the rest of the poker.’ I went to the grate and examined the poker, which, being an old one, had been much burned; and where the action of the fire had been fiercest and had worn away the iron, a piece of between two and three inches had been wrenched off and was missing. Still I could hardly credit that the human stomach could receive such a dose and remain ‘feeling,’ as the professed swallower of it said, ‘nothing particular.’ However the constant affirming of the first, united to the assent and rueful looks of the second, induced me to use the patient as though the account were true: I administered very strong medicines, and watched their effects constantly. The man eat and drank and slept as usual, and appeared to suffer nothing but from the effect of the medicines. At last, to my astonishment, the piece of the poker came away, and the man was as well as ever. The iron had undergone a regular process of digestion and the surface of it was deeply honey-combed by the action of the juices. This was a most singular case, and proves how the God of Nature has endowed our system with powers of sustaining and redressing the effects of our own follies.”