Intestinal obstruction

Abstract

A group of patients with intestinal obstruction have been reviewed with lantern slides of roentgen-ray or operative findings. These cases illustrate problems of etiology, diagnosis or therapy in patients with intestinal obstruction, acute or chronic, partial or complete, and functional or organic, at different levels of the intestinal tract. The group includes such conditions as paralytic ileus, intussusception of the proximal colon, volvulus of the cecum and ascending colon, pyloric obstruction due to inflammatory swelling, congenital defect in Auerbach's plexus, chronic duodenal ileus, carcinoma of the jejunum, periduodenal adhesions, and post-appendectomy, pericecal adhesions. The conditions referred to as intestinal obstruction comprise such a wide variety of individual problems in diagnosis or therapy, that the unqualified use of this broad, generic term fails to specify the real nature of the problem. Although the term may still have value in general considerations, a great deal would undoubtedly be gained in the training of medica students and hospital interns by placing greater stress upon the essential importance of not making a diagnosis of intestinal obstruction without qualifying, or at least attempting to qualify, in each instance, this generic diagnosis with the specific type of obstruction present.