Man Hiccupped For 68 Years

Charles Osborne was an ordinary farmer in a small Iowa town. He worked the land, raised a family, and liked to sit on a bench at the street corner, greeting people as they passed. Nothing about his life looked remarkable from the outside — except for one thing. From the age of twenty-nine until he was ninety-six years old, Charles Osborne hiccupped. Not for an hour. Not for a week. For sixty-eight years.

An Ordinary Morning in June 1922

On 13 June 1922, Osborne was working on a farm near Union, Nebraska. He was preparing to butcher a hog, and the animal weighed about 350 pounds. As he later told People magazine, he was hanging the hog up when he picked it up and fell down. He felt nothing at the time — no sharp pain, no injury he could point to. But the hiccups began, and they simply never stopped. His doctor later told him that the fall had burst a tiny blood vessel, about the size of a pin, in his brain. It was such a small thing to change a whole life.

First, What Is a Hiccup?

A hiccup is a sudden spasm of the diaphragm, the wide muscle at the base of the lungs that helps you breathe. The spasm makes you pull in a quick breath, and then your vocal cords snap shut almost at once. That sudden closing is what makes the familiar “hic” sound. For most of us, hiccups arrive for no clear reason — after eating too fast, drinking something fizzy, or simply out of nowhere — and leave again within a few minutes. Doctors advise seeing a medical professional if hiccups go on for more than a few days, because in rare cases long-lasting hiccups can be a sign of a problem with the nerves or the brain. Charles Osborne’s case sits at the far, almost unbelievable end of that rare road.

What Did the Doctors Think Went Wrong?

Osborne’s doctor, Terence Anthoney, believed the fall had damaged a very small area in the brainstem — the part of the brain that normally puts a stop to the hiccup reflex. Think of that little area as a brake. In most people the brake works quietly all day, ending each bout of hiccups quickly. In Osborne, doctors believed, the brake itself was broken, so the hiccups had no way to switch off. Other doctors over the years suggested different possibilities, such as an injury to his ribs or diaphragm from the fall. The honest truth is that nobody ever proved the cause. It remained a guess for his whole life — and it remains one today.

Twenty to Forty Times a Minute

For most of those sixty-eight years, Osborne hiccupped between twenty and forty times every minute. Day and night. While he ate, while he worked, while he tried to sleep. People who study his case estimate that across his lifetime he hiccupped around 430 million times. The longest rest he ever reported from the hiccups was about fifty hours. The constant jerking left his body sore, ruined his sleep, and as the years passed made solid food hard to swallow; in his later years he blended most of his meals, with a favourite lunch of blended chicken, dressing, broth and milk.

And yet, somehow, he taught himself one small mercy. Doctors explained that the “hic” sound comes from the vocal cords snapping shut, so Osborne learned to breathe in between the hiccups in a way that hid the noise. A friend from his town remembered that his chest would flex a few times every minute, and you could see he was hiccupping, but he made almost no sound at all. He heaved quietly, and carried on with his conversation.

A Life That Refused to Pause

What amazes me most about Charles Osborne is not the record — it is how stubbornly normal his life stayed. He married twice: first Laura Marie Rowles in 1914, and after that marriage ended, Lucille Mundt in 1927, who stayed with him until her death in 1978. He fathered eight children. He retired from farming in 1961, sold farm machinery, and worked for a time as a livestock auctioneer — a job that asks a man to talk fast and loud for hours, all while his chest was quietly heaving. His strange fame grew slowly: he appeared on the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! radio programme in 1936, in the Dear Abby advice column, and even on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. But the people of Anthon, Iowa, remembered something simpler — a cheerful man on a bench who rarely brought up his own troubles.

The Long Search for a Cure

Osborne did not accept his fate without a fight. He tried dozens of treatments over the years, including experimental hormone therapy, and he drew the line only at a surgical procedure that might have damaged his breathing — some risks, he decided, were worse than the hiccups. In his younger years he travelled long distances to see doctors, going as far as Alaska, before the cost and the disappointment wore him down. His employer once sent him for special treatment in Omaha, Nebraska; he made four trips, and each time the hiccups returned as soon as he got home. At the famous Mayo Clinic, a doctor managed to stop the hiccups using a mixture of carbon monoxide and oxygen — but breathing a poisonous gas is not a life anyone can live, so that cure had to be abandoned. After his case spread through newspapers and television, strangers sent him an estimated 4,000 letters of sympathy, full of home remedies: massage your fingers, press on your chin, drink water through a cloth. His reply to nearly every suggestion was the same — tried that. Even a friend firing both barrels of a shotgun behind him to frighten the hiccups away changed nothing. Osborne admitted it scared him, but it did not scare the hiccups out of him.

In 1978, after fifty-six years of it, he said he would give everything he had in the world to be rid of them, and that he did not know what it would feel like not to have them. He got sore, he said, from jerking all the time.

The Morning It Finally Stopped

Then, one morning in February 1990, when Charles Osborne was about ninety-six years old, the hiccups stopped. Just like that. No new medicine, no operation, no explanation — after sixty-eight years, the jerking simply ended, as quietly as it had begun. No doctor could say why. Guinness World Records lists his case as the longest attack of hiccups ever recorded, and the ending of it is as much a mystery as the beginning.

He lived about one more year in that new, strange silence. For a man who had not known a single quiet day since he was twenty-nine years old, that silence must have felt almost as unbelievable as the hiccups once had. Charles Osborne died on 1 May 1991, at the age of ninety-seven, in Sioux City, Iowa — finally free of the hiccups that had walked beside him through almost his entire adult life.

A Small Note Before You Go

This post tells a true story from medical history; it is not medical advice. Most hiccups are harmless and pass in minutes, but if you or someone in your family ever has hiccups that last more than a few days, please see a doctor rather than waiting — that is the standard guidance from medical references such as MedlinePlus.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was the man who hiccupped for 68 years?

Charles Osborne, a farmer from Anthon, Iowa, in the United States. He hiccupped from 1922 to 1990, and Guinness World Records lists his as the longest attack of hiccups ever recorded.

What caused Charles Osborne’s hiccups?

They began after he fell while hanging a 350-pound hog for butchering in June 1922. His doctor believed the fall burst a blood vessel the size of a pin in his brain and damaged the small area that switches off the hiccup reflex. The cause was never proven, and other doctors suggested a rib or diaphragm injury instead.

How many hiccups did Charles Osborne have in his life?

He hiccupped roughly twenty to forty times a minute for most of sixty-eight years, which adds up to an estimated 430 million hiccups in his lifetime.

Did Charles Osborne ever find a cure?

No. Doctors at the Mayo Clinic once stopped the hiccups with carbon monoxide and oxygen, but the gas was too dangerous to keep using. Thousands of home remedies sent by kind strangers also failed, and the hiccups only ended on their own in 1990.

When did the hiccups stop, and when did he die?

The hiccups stopped suddenly in February 1990, without any explanation. Charles Osborne died on 1 May 1991, aged ninety-seven, after enjoying roughly a year of quiet at the end of his life.