The Strange Case of Tom Little

Page Three

At age 17, during a rough-and-tumble football game with friends, Tom was pinned at the bottom of a pile. There, the tip of the ball drove into his gut, herniating the stomach lining. A physician later described the injury: “In the early hours of the following morning he was awakened by an excruciating pain throughout the lower portion of the abdomen, and, examining his stomach for the first time, he found a large portion of his [stomach lining] protruding through his opening.”

Tom went to the doctor—something he had done his best to avoid since his initial injury—and learned that surgeons would have to enlarge the opening in his stomach. While the procedure relieved his pain, the larger incision made it more difficult to contain the contents of his stomach—and to disguise his condition.

Although Tom held the doctors who saved his life at age 9 in high esteem, he was suspect of other physicians. Even the doctors he first encountered while receiving outpatient care were, in Tom’s opinion, too curt and less interested in him than his “medical oddity.” Less than a year after his football injury, Tom visited a hospital seeking some sort of belt to help contain his stomach contents. But, in Tom’s eyes, the doctor was more interested in poking around his midsection than in helping him.

So Tom stomped out of the hospital mid-visit. It would be 36 years before he would allow another physician to examine his stomach.

Tom was only 10 years old when he dropped out of school to take a job as a plumber’s assistant. It would pave the way for a life of menial positions, from stage manager to sewer maintenance worker.

Tom lived with his sister until age 28, when he married a woman a few years his senior. She was a widow who already had three children. “I could have gotten plenty of younger ones, but I was afraid a younger woman might eventually get disgusted with the way I feed,” he said.

Caring for his family was hard, and work for an uneducated man like Tom was too often scarce—and temporary. The Great Depression only worsened matters. When even able-bodied men could scarcely find a job, who would consider hiring a man with a hole in his stomach to perform physical labor? That made concealing his condition a necessity.

It was in 1939, while digging ditches, that the strain of Tom’s work became too much. Tightly fitted gauze around his stomach began to chafe, ripping at the edges of the incision and causing it to bleed continuously. The loss of blood left him unable to work, and only after his wife begged and pleaded did Tom, then 53 years old, finally consent to see a doctor.

Physicians fixed the problem but caused another. In the process of stopping the bleeding, they were forced to remove some of Tom’s stomach lining; this resulted in further leakage of stomach acid and food from the hole.

With this added burden of concealment, “honest” work proved even harder to come by. An extremely proud man, Tom wasn’t about to take charity. When his physicians approached him about the possibility of becoming a research subject, Tom was hardly enthused by the prospect. But times were tight. “If I couldn’t support my family, I’d as soon jump off the end of the dock,” he said.