IN THEIR excellent monograph on cholangiography, Partington and Sachs credit Saralegui with the first performance of postoperative cholangiography in 1926. In 1936, Pablo Mirizzi, Chief of the Surgical Clinic at the University of Cordoba, Argentina, first reported his studies on operative cholangiography. I had the good fortune to be asked to review his monograph on "La cholecystectomie sans drainage." Half of this monograph is devoted to methods of performing cholangiography and includes good illustrations of the various types of obstructing lesions encountered. Thiessen and Walters, and many others, including Best and Hicken, and Doubilet in this country and Mallet-Guy, Bergeret, and Caroli in France, began using postoperative cholangiography. McGowan, Butsch, and Walters, and Mallet-Guy, and probably others combined studies of intraductal pressure with it.
Over the years postoperative cholangiography has established itself as a valuable procedure. In fact it has become practically a routine when T-tube drainage of the common