The First Successful Gastrectomy

Abstract

In the latter part of the 19th century safe and effective elective abdominal surgery seemed to be, at last, more than just a dream. This possibility followed two vital advances. First, the introduction of anaesthesia, heralded by the use of ether by William Morton in Boston in 1845 and then of chloroform by J.Y. Simpson in Edinburgh a couple of years later, and second the work of Joseph Lister on the antiseptic method of surgery, following his publication on this subject in the Lancet in 1867. (Interestingly enough, as far as I know, Lister himself never performed a laparotomy - if anything he was principally an orthopaedic surgeon.) The major elective abdominal problem facing the surgeon at that time was the surgical management of carcinoma of the stomach - then the commonest killing cancer.