Duodenal Ulcer

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. Among the many and great developments of modern abdominal surgery, few of the problems which were to be unravelled have proved more interesting than that concerned with duodenal ulcer. Ten years ago ulceration of the duodenum was looked upon as a rare disease, and its confident recognition during life was believed to be hardly possible. To-day we know that this disease is common, and its discovery in the majority of cases presents no great difficulties to the trained clinician. In my own experience the diagnosis of duodenal ulcer is made with a degree of accuracy that is not exceeded in the case of any other abdominal disorder.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature in the history of this condition is the fact that its main symptoms have through generations of text-books been ascribed without reserve or hesitation to the existence not of an organic but of a purely functional disturbance. The varied and accumulating experience of a few surgeons soon led, however, to the conviction that the range of functional disorders of the stomach must for the future be greatly narrowed, that not a few of the so-called neuroses of the stomach were veritable examples of structural changes having their seat in the stomach, duodenum, gall-bladder or appendix.