Sometimes children do things they shouldn’t do, like stick weird things up their nose or swallow non-food items. Believe it or not, there is a museum collection at Boston Children’s Hospital full of random stuff removed from young patients going all the way back to 1918. Pushpins tack the objects to typewritten cards with labels like, “Celluloid hand, larynx, 10-6-31” and “Doll’s eye in roof of mouth, 1-14-44, Dr. Ferguson.”
Ferguson, who worked at the hospital for 35 years, is supposedly the inspiration behind the collection. As seen in the photos above, Ferguson and other doctors removed items from the esophaguses of children, like a button supporting President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s reelection, a toy pin, a ring, a cotton swab, and a sardine key, throughout the 1940s.
