ABSTRACT
Instances of penetrating head injury are much rarer than their counterpart, closed-head injury. Within the penetrating variety lies an even rarer subset—‘low-velocity intra-nasal penetrating injuries’, i.e. penetration of the skull and brain by means of a slow-moving object passing up the nostril. Although very uncommon, the literature contains several instances of this kind of injury. One source comes from cases of ritual suicide that involve ramming a chopstick up the nose (Yamamoto, Yamada, & Sato, 1985). In addition, de Tribolet, Guignard, and Zander (1979) reported a young boy who suffered a transcranial injury when a paint brush went up his nose. Rawlinson, Russell, Coakham, and Byrnes (1988) described a man who, following a dispute about a snooker match, was held to the floor by his opponent and a snooker cue was pushed up his left nostril. This injury resulted in damage to the mammillary bodies and hypothalamus (Dusoir, Kapur, Byrnes, McKinstry, & Hoare, 1990).
