The (mainly) men who have fallen under sway of drinks vending machines
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Version 0 of 1. We all know that fizzy drinks can affect the health of people who drink them, especially in super-size quantities, but – even worse – fizzy drinks in a vending machine sometimes bring immediate violent death when the machines are attacked. This is documented dramatically by Dr Michael Q Cosio in a 1988 research study published in the esteemed Journal of the American Medical Association. In the summary of his paper, Soda Pop Vending Machine Injuries, Cosio minces no words. “Fifteen male patients, 15 to 24 years of age, sustained injuries after rocking soda machines. The machines fell on to the victims, resulting in a variety of injuries. Three were killed. The remaining 12 required hospitalisation for their injuries.” At the time, Cosio was working at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC. He has since died. I have not determined the manner of his passing. The alarming incidents all happened at American military bases in Germany and Korea. Cosio’s method was to pore through medical reports and newspaper accounts, then personally interview most of the survivors, some of the family members, and many of the medical professionals who had dealt with the human wreckage from the machine attacks. All the injured and dead were male, their ages, at the moment they tried to tip a soda machine, ranging from 15 to 24. Their injuries were various — a fractured skull here, a partial toe amputation there, an evulsed nerve, a punctured bladder, many leg bone and ligament injuries and, of course, those three deaths. There was little mystery as to the young men’s motives in initiating their machine dance macabre. A police investigation of one of the deaths, Cosio tells us, revealed that it was “common knowledge in the barracks that the machine that crushed the victim would dispense a free soda if rocked vigorously”. Yes, little mystery. But there was noirish detail aplenty about the deceased. One man “was found by his wife … it took four men to lift the soda machine off the victim”. The second “victim” (Cosio’s word) “was found pinned to a wall with the soda machine resting on his neck”. The third fellow succumbed when “the victim’s friend could no longer hold up the machine. The victim was crushed.” Cosio became a man on a mission. He went on to collect additional cases of injury and death due to toppling of the pops. Four years after shocking some portion of the world with Soda Pop Vending Machine Injuries, he published Soda Pop Vending Machine Injuries: An Update, this time published in the Journal of Orthopaedic Trauma. The new study tallied “64 cases of injuries secondary to crushing by a soda machine”, including 15 deaths. Reflecting a world shaken by a slight loosening of the patriarchal hegemony – a hegemonic loosening that extended even unto to abuse of soda vending machines – the report reveals that one of the injury victims was female. |