THE TOOTHPICK is still widely used in America. It accompanies the Martini, the Manhattan, the Old-Fashioned, the canapé and the club sandwich. The integrity of the last popular item with its many unstable layers requires the holding power of the toothpick. One equipped with artificial dentures may not have to use the toothpick as such, but with the loss of sensory stimuli in the roof of the mouth and the gums it is much easier to ingest unknowingly a foreign body in a morsel of food. Cocktails, canapés and club sandwiches are conducive to the careless handling of toothpicks, and that more are not arrested somewhere along the intestinal tract is due only to the marvelous mechanism in the intestinal tube which makes it possible to manage foreign bodies in great quantity without serious damage. This mechanism was described by Carp1 in 1927. He described the experimental work of