What Caused this Iowa Man to Have the Hiccups for 68 Years?

Getting the hiccups can be a major inconvenience for just about anybody. Usually, it starts innocently enough, eating a meal too fast, swallowing a bit of excess air, or just drinking a favorite carbonated beverage. When it hits, you do everything you can to get rid of it, to varying levels of success. You try drinking water upside down, holding your breath until you turn red, having someone scare you, or even swallowing a spoonful of sugar. Who knows if any of these old-school remedies actually work, but eventually, the spasms subside, and you move on with your life.

But one man never got to move on.

While his bizarre condition eventually turned him into a global celebrity, if you were to ask Charles Osborne of Anthon, Iowa, he would have likely told you that he’d take the all the fame back in a heartbeat just for one full day of peace and quiet. Instead, he endured the ultimate medical anomaly. Here is the unbelievable true story of how a routine day on an Iowa farm triggered a 68-year case of the hiccups, and the fascinating science behind why they lasted so long.

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Charles Osborne Got the Hiccups Because He Lifted a Hog?

In June of 1922, Charles Osborne was just a young farmhand, preparing to slaughter a 350 pound hog. As he lifted it, Charles lost his footing, slipped and fell to the ground. Luckily, he wasn't in any immediate pain from the fall, but almost as soon as he stood up, Charles began to hiccup. And he would continue to hiccup for (nearly) the rest of his life on earth.

What Charles couldn't have known at the time was that when he fell that fateful day, a tiny pin-sized blood vessel burst in his brain stem. It was a microscopic injury, yet it caused him have permanent damage to the area of the brain that tells the diaphragm to "stop".

Well, naturally, if you continue to hiccup nonstop for decades, you're going to gain a certain amount of attention. So much attention, that Charles eventually earned a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records.

He was featured on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, That’s Incredible!, and Ripley’s Believe It or Not!. Over the decades, his fame brought in a big wave of public sympathy; he estimated receiving over 4,000 letters from well-meaning strangers offering "guaranteed" home remedies. People suggested everything from standing on his head to experimental hormone therapy, but the relentless hiccups continued.

Perhaps the most amazing part of this tale is how it ended. After living with the hiccups for 68 years, one day in 1990, they just... stopped. There was no miracle cure or medical breakthrough; his body's "hiccup clock" simply ran out. Charles Osborne got to enjoy a little over a year of "hiccup free" living before passing away from natural causes in May of 1991.