Man became human cashbox

French doctors were taken aback when they discovered the reason for a patient’s sore, swollen stomach: he had swallowed around 350 coins with assorted necklaces and needles.

The 62-year-old man went to the emergency room of Cholet General Hospital in central western France in January 2002. He had a history of major psychiatric illness, was suffering from stomach pain, and could not eat or move his bowels.

His family warned doctors that he sometimes swallowed coins, and a few had been removed from his stomach in past hospital visits.

Still, doctors were awed when they took an X-ray. They discovered an enormous opaque mass in his stomach that turned out to weigh 12 pounds. It was so heavy it had forced his stomach down between his hips.

Five days after his arrival, doctors cut him open and removed his badly damaged stomach with its contents. He died 12 days later from complications.

One of his doctors, Limoges-based intensive care specialist Bruno Francois, said the patient had swallowed the coins – both French currency and later Euros - over about a decade. Knowing he ate such objects, his family tried to keep coins and jewellery away from him.

“He liked eating coins,” said Dr Francois. “When he was invited and came in some homes, he liked to steal coins and eat them.”

The patient’s rare condition is called pica, a compulsion to eat things not normally consumed as food. Its name comes from the Latin word for magpie, a bird thought to eat just about anything.

Pica can take the form of eating dirt, ashes, chalk, hair, soap, toothbrushes, burned matches and many other things. Francois once treated a patient who ate forks. Most such objects are small enough to pass on their own, but some must be removed by doctors.

The condition is perhaps best known in children and pregnant women but is also sometimes linked to psychiatric illness and other eating disorders.

The case history of the French patient, whose name was withheld, was reported in The New England Journal of Medicine.