Mesenteric Blood Vessels: Advances in Surgery and Physiology

The literature of mesenteric vascular occlusion was extensive even before the turn of the century. Shortly after Tiedemann²⁸¹reported the first clinical case of superior mesenteric artery occlusion in 1843, Virchow²⁸⁷and Litten¹⁸⁶independently reported additional cases. By 1875, there were already two collective reviews in the literature, those of Litten¹⁸⁶and Faber.¹⁰²By 1895, 50 reported cases were collected by Elliot,⁹⁷who analyzed the diagnostic and therapeutic information previously delineated by Gerhardt¹²⁰in 1863 and Kussmaul¹⁶⁴in 1864. Admirable experimental work, too, was done before 1900. Experimental occlusions of the mesenteric vessels were brilliantly studied by a long list of investigators whose names today are meaningful only to the scholar.* By 1904, Jackson et al¹⁴⁸were able to summarize the subject in an authoritative manner, and added 26 cases to the existing literature. A more extensive compilation appeared a decade