The Mechanism of Swallowing

Abstract

The common experience that foreign bodies of similar shape and size can become impacted in one patient in the upper part of the oesophagus and in another patient in the lower part, carries the suggestion that the difference depends more on the nature of the force which has projected them into the oesophagus than on the behaviour of the oesophageal wall itself. The same applies to the development of corrosive stenosis, which can also be found either in the upper or in the lower part of the oesophagus. Thus it has seemed important to examine the forces which carry the bolus into the oesophagus.