An article dealing with the relationship between appendicitis and pelvic disease may seem like a profitless reversion to ancient gynecologic history; nevertheless, in the consideration of even so well-worn a subject as this, fresh experience adds new points of view, and the recording of such experience cannot be without some value.
Fifteen and twenty years ago, the output of literature relating to the appendix and the female pelvis was colossal. It was, however, devoted mainly to the discussion, at that time absorbingly important, of the routine removal of the appendix during gynecologic operations, Overwhelming evidence was produced showing not only that the appendix is frequently involved secondarily in pelvic inflammatory disease, but that unsuspected inflammations of the appendix, often unrecognizable by gross inspection, may occur entirely independently of pelvic lesions. Many writers, such as Fraenkel, Pollak and Bandler, recognized also the possibility of an inflammatory process traveling from the appendix