The Old, The New and The Future in Fecal Microbiota Transplantation

In the seventeenth century, the Italian doctor Girolamo Fabrizi d' Acquapendente, who had Williams Harvey as his most famous student, determined Transplantation as Transfaunation; word from English "Transfaunation": Transfer part (or all) of the symbiotic flora of the digestive tract [4]. The ingestion of fresh hot dromedary feces was suggested by Bedouins to German soldiers with dysentery, in World War II [5]. In Eiseman B, et al [5] a surgeon from Colorado, United States of America, treated patients with pseudo-membranous colitis, with good results [6]. The bacterium called Clostridium difficile, which generates pseudomembranous colitis, was isolated in 1930, although it was described until 1978 as the causative agent of this disease. That year it was isolated from the stool of a patient receiving Clindamycin [7]. These events are of enormous importance, since FMT is mainly directed at the management of recurrent infection by Clostridiodes difficile.