Once upon a time, there were long intestinal tubes known as the Miller-Abbott tube, and its more popular descendant, the Cantor tube. 1 Both were mainstays in the management of small-intestinal obstruction 2 and were as common on a surgical ward as junior residents. Successful intubation of the dilated small intestine was mostly art, partly science. The art was in passing the tube through the nares and traversing the no man's land of the stomach; the science was in proper positioning of the patient and proper timing of the application of the suction. When the tubes worked well, they worked wonders, as the tube tip, weighted with a mercury-filled bag (which characterized both tubes) moved robot-like down to the point of obstruction. When the tubes didn't work, frustration was rife in all ranks from attending to intern, not to mention the exhausted patient. Then quite suddenly, like the extinction of the dinosaurs by the calamitous comet of yore, the long tube disappeared. Current house staff have not even heard of, much less utilized, the long tube. It has been relegated to the obscurity of obsolescent surgical maneuvers along with Wangensteen suction and hypodermal clysis. Is this obsolescence warranted? Is the long tube not only not to be remembered, but also not to be missed? The demise of the long tube was decreed by the outlawing of metallic mercury as a toxic chemical and extremely hazardous waste in the 1991 Federal Register. 3 Initially, some mercury was bootlegged to the bedside by a few diehard devotees of the long tube. Then some futile efforts were made to substitute barium for the mercury, but barium came nowhere near replacing the magical properties of metallic mercury. Finally, in desperation, theconcept took hold that gastric decompression served the purpose just as well and with much less trouble for all concerned. But did it? True, there were some studies that purported to show that it did. 4'5 But what of that intrepid gatekeeper, the pylorus, when it failed to open the floodgates to the fluidfilled small intestine? And was it not more logical to carry the remedy to the problem, that is, get the tube to the point of obstruction, rather than hope the problem, the dammedup gas and fluids, would find the tube, which often coiled in the stomach?