ACUTE PANCREATITIS

The increasing incidence, the relative scarcity of preoperative diagnosis, the high mortality rate and the lack of uniformity in therapy merit the many reports of acute pancreatitis which have appeared in the literature within recent years. All of the clinical bibliography is available by reference to de Takáts and Mackenzie's review.¹ They presented thirty cases of acute pancreatic necrosis in which operations had been performed by nine different surgeons during the years from 1920 to 1930. Two months later McWhorter² reported sixty-four cases in which operations had been performed by thirty-two surgeons, all members of the Chicago Surgical Society; in this report he presented a rather extensive review of the literature. The efforts to produce acute hemorrhagic pancreatic necrosis experimentally with a view toward elucidating the etiologic factors involved, have been thoroughly reviewed by Wangensteen, Leven and Manson.³ It is because we believe that the accumulation of