Vagotomy in Modern Surgical Practice [antikvár]

PrefaceIt is possible that the first vagotomy was performed by Jaboulay in 1900. Vagotomy was certainly used by Exnor in 1912 to treat tabetic crises and in the same year was used by Bircher for the treatment of gastroduodenal ulceration. Although used by such great surgeons as Lataijet, Pauchet, Schiasi, Georgesco and Vintila, it failed to gain favour until re-discovered or re-introduced as a truncal vagotomy in the treatment of gastroduodenal ulceration by Dragstedt and Owens in 1943.After its first 40 years in obscurity, in the next 40 years vagotomy established itself as one of the major weapons in the armentarium of gastric surgeons. Its popularity coincided with the birth of surgical science, when measurement and statistical comparison made it possible for surgeons to test what they were doing to their patients. Gastric secretion could be measured, the results were shown to be reproducible and numbers could be attached to the effects of operation. In the 1950s and 1960s many University Surgical Units in the western world taught their aspiring academic surgeons to study vagotomy and its effect. Once we had achieved the means of measurement, prospective clinical trials came of age in surgery and, as soon as different types of vagotomy appeared, one could be compared with another. Thereafter there was never a shortage of papers published, or scientific papers delivered, on the subject of vagotomy and its effects.In the history of surgery the development of technique usually precedes the evaluation of results and so the first monographs to be written on the subject of vagotomy were 'how to do it' manuals, usually with simple titles such as 'Vagotomy' or 'Les Vagotomies'.In 1969, with a colleague, one of us decided to record the effects, particularly the ill effects, of vagotomy. The book was given the half-facetious title After Vagotomy. The title suggested that all was not necessarily perfect after vagotomy, as was sometimes implied in the technical 'How to do it' manuals. The production of this book, published by Butterworths, brought together a team of collaborators from the Royal Postgraduate Medical School in Hammersmith and from Birmingham who have continued a joint interest in the subject ever since.In 1972 the team were invited to make a presentation of the results of the newly emerging different types of vagotomy at a meeting organized by the late Professor Herry Muller in Rotterdam. The Rotterdam meeting was concerned with the controlled clinical trials that were then being conducted to compare the newly