EXPERIMENTAL PERITONITIS AND PERITONEAL IMMUNITY

Whenever the bowel must be incised or resected, absolute asepsis cannot be maintained, and peritonitis is still a relatively common postoperative complication. New methods of preventing peritonitis must be developed. Experimental investigation in this field has been greatly hampered by the difficulty of producing peritonitis experimentally. No one has yet been able to reproduce at will a uniform type of peritonitis comparable to the clinical condition as it occurs in man. Obviously, when the fundamental factors on which the development of a disease depends are so little understood, one may expect little progress in its prevention. My experiments were undertaken for the purpose of investigating these fundamental factors. My original purpose was to study the causes of death in peritonitis. It soon became apparent, however, that an understanding must first be gained of the factors by which experimental peritonitis may be produced. This study then led to a consideration of