A 56-year-old man spent 25 days with a fever nobody could explain. He had no stomach pain, no nausea, no vomiting. A local clinic gave him about a week of penicillin. The fever did not budge.
When he finally reached Shandong Provincial Hospital in Jinan, China, a contrast CT scan found a 4.5 by 3.0 centimeter abscess in his liver and, running toward it, a thin bright line about 3.5 centimeters long that began at the wall of his duodenum and ended inside the abscess cavity. Only after the scan prompted doctors to take a fuller dietary history did he remember swallowing a fish bone about three and a half weeks earlier. He had not thought it worth mentioning.
