Von Winiwarter,1 in 1878, described a case in which the arteries of a lower extremity were occluded by a chronic proliferative process arising from the intima and showed an inflammatory reaction of the walls of the vessels. He called this lesion "endarteritis obliterans."
Since then many writers have described this disease, but it was not until the studies of Buerger2 in 1908 that the pathologic changes were minutely described and the disease established as a definite clinical and pathologic entity. From the time of the first description by von Winiwarter1 to the present, there has been a tremendous amount of study and investigation of this lesion.
It is the object in this paper to direct attention to the more general distribution of the disease in contradistiction to what has previously been believed concerning it—that it is a disease involving the blood vessels of the extremities exclusively. It