Appendectomy

I got in a conversation on the bus this morning with my friend and neighbor Micah about appendicitis. We both had our appendices removed, and spend a good ten minutes marveling that as little as a hundred years ago, we'd both be dead. Unless we lucked out and were tough enough to get over the burst appendix, which, it seems, is possible, though not terribly likely.

So, of course, I did some research on the history of the appendectomy, and it seems we could have lived as far back as 1890, which seems to be when the first appendectomies were performed.

According to this website:

"The first report of an appendectomy came from Amyan, a surgeon of the English army. Amyan performed an appendectomy in 1735 without anesthesia to remove a perforated appendix. Reginald H. Fitz, an anatomopathologist at Harvard who advocated early surgical intervention, first described appendicitis in 1886. Because he was not a surgeon, his advice was ignored for a time.

"Then, at the end of the 19th century, the English surgeon H. Hancock successfully performed the first appendectomy in a patient with acute appendicitis. Some years after this, the American C. McBurney published a series of reports that constituted the basis of the subsequent diagnostic and therapeutic management of acute appendicitis."


This next article is lengthy, but it's a lot more interesting. It mentions suspicions that Hippocrates might have died of appendicitis, and talks about finding all kinds of gross things (bullets and worms!) inside the appendix of people 'misdiagnosed' with gas or intestinal obstruction:

"Kronlein (1884) first removed the appendix for acute disease employing an incision thru the linea alba but his patient did not recover. It was just about this time, you will recall, that Reginald Fitz made his great clinical contribution to the subject. Then followed operations in all parts. Sands, in 1887, successfully closed a perforation of the appendix by suture, while in 1888 Treves has been credited with doing the first “interval” operation (though some claim this honor for charter Symonds, an Englishman, in 1885). In 1889, Lawson Tait split open and drained an inflamed appendix without removing it, and his patient recovered. And so it goes. By 1890 one author has listed nearly a hundred appendiceal operators, and his collection is far from complete.

"But to Thomas G. Morton of Philadelphia belongs the credit of the first successful operation for the removal of the appendix, deliberately undertaken with an alternative diagnosis of disease in the organ. Through the kindness of Dr. Ellson, of Philadelphia, I am able to give you a report of this case just as presented to the College of Physicians, June 1, 1887 by Dr. Woodbury."


Gross? Yes. But also awesome.