Word: stomaching
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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According to medical statistics, some 12 million Americans have, or have had, ulcers of the stomach or duodenum...
Wanting in Elegance. Nobody knows the root cause of ulcers in the digestive tract, but what happens after the process gets started is fairly clear. Countless cells in the wall of the stomach secrete chemicals, such as gastrin, and hydrochloric acid. These are designed by nature for the digestion of food. But if for any reason-physical or emotional -the stomach cells churn out digestive juices when there is no food for them to work on, they may start digesting a spot on the wall of the stomach itself. The result is a gastric ulcer. More often, the corrosive juices...
...Stomach surgery has developed in a broken-gaited fashion, with surgeons periodically going back to and modifying old techniques. Physicians realized in the 1880s that man can get along, after a fashion, with only a remnant of his stomach. German-born Surgeon Theodor Billroth then decided it was possible to cut out the lower stomach and pylorus and join what was left of the stomach to the duodenum (see top diagram). After this "subtotal gastrectomy," or "Billroth I," came a still more daring invention, "hemigastrectomy," or "Billroth II": cutting out about half of the stomach and hitching up what...
After 1930, these and variant operations were widely used for ulcers. It mattered not that the ulcer might be in the duodenum: the part to cut out, the doctors reasoned, was in the stomach, where the digestive juices were being overproduced. Over the years, doctors concluded that this part was high up in the stomach. Some surgeons went on cutting out not only 50% but 75% to 80% of the stomach. "This," complains Boston's famed Surgeon Francis D. Moore (TIME cover, May 3), "is not only crippling but wanting in elegance of rationale...
Despite such criticism, drastic operations did much good for some patients. The trouble was, no one could tell in advance which patients would die during or soon after the operation, which would develop ulcers again, or which would have a "poor nutritional result" because their reduced stomach dumped undigested food into their small bowels within five or ten minutes after meals instead of a few hours...