"Sex is good for lots of things - now it seems we can add hiccup cure to the list."

If you follow the annual presentation of the tongue-in-cheek Ig Nobel Prize, then you already know that modern medicine has come up with at least one promising hiccup cure. As is often the case for the Nobel Prizes that the Ig Nobel parodies, the recognition of Francis Fesmire's work came much later than it should have.

Back in 1988 Fesmire published a revolutionary paper entitled Termination of intractable hiccups with digital rectal massage in the journal Annals of Emergency Medicine (annals . . . that's funny).

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I've heard jokes about how he might have discovered the effect, but it's not really such a stretch. The key to Fesmire's discovery may be stimulation of the vagus nerve. Other researchers have noted the connection between the vagus nerve and hiccups. Unlike most of the nerves that make their way from your brain to other parts of your...