A MODIFIED TECHNIC FOR TOTAL GASTRECTOMY

SURGICAL history records that Phineas Conner,¹ of Cincinnati, did the first complete gastrectomy on a human being in 1884. His patient died on the operating table before the operation could be completed. Thirteen years later, in 1897, Schlatter,² of Switzerland, successfully removed the stomach completely, and his patient survived one year and fifty-three days. In a discussion of Schlatter's case at a meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Chirgurie in 1898, Krönlein defined total gastrectomy as complete removal of the stomach with both the pylorus and the cardia and stated that, when examined, the specimen should show a portion of the duodenum at one end and a portion of the esophagus at the other. In a study of all total gastrectomies up to 1929, Finney and Rienhoff³ emphasized the importance of Krönlein's definition, since they found that more than half of the operations recorded as total gastrectomies