Charles Osborne's 68-Year Hiccups: A 350-Pound Hog and 430 Million Spasms

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Charles Andrew Osborne, born around 1893 or 1894 in Missouri, was a farmer working fields across Nebraska and Iowa when, in 1922 near Union, Nebraska, a 350 pound hog he was preparing to slaughter collapsed on top of him. He began hiccuping and did not stop for 68 years, an estimated 430 million hiccups. The episode walks through what a hiccup is, the vagus nerve, the phrenic nerve, the diaphragm's jerk and the glottis snapping shut, and the two theories offered for his case: a badly pulled abdominal muscle, or a burst blood vessel that destroyed a tiny region of the brainstem responsible for stopping the reflex.

Osborne kept farming until 1961, learning to breathe between spasms to soften the sound and pacing his meals and speech around them. His first marriage, to Laura Marie Rowles in 1914, ended in divorce, and in 1927, five years into the hiccups, he married Lucille Louise Mundt, who stayed with him for more than 50 years until her death in 1978. His condition made him a reluctant celebrity on radio, in print and on late night television. In 1990 the hiccups stopped with no documented treatment or explanation, and he died on May 1, 1991, at the Marian Health Center in Sioux City, Iowa, at 97 or 98.

The broken pocket watch and tractor brake analogies for a perfectly isolated injury
Why a brainstem bleed that left everything else intact struck doctors as almost impossible
A 1936 appearance on the Ripley's Believe It or Not radio program
A 1982 guest spot on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and a mention in Dear Abby
His Guinness World Record for the longest attack of hiccups

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