SURGICAL history records that Phineas Conner,1of Cincinnati, did the first complete gastrectomy on a human being in 1884. His patient died on the operating table before the operation could be completed. Thirteen years later, in 1897, Schlatter,2of Switzerland, successfully removed the stomach completely, and his patient survived one year and fifty-three days. In a discussion of Schlatter's case at a meeting of theDeutsche Gesellschaft fur Chirguriein 1898, Kronlein defined total gastrectomy as complete removal of the stomach with both the pylorus and the cardia and stated that, when examined, the specimen should show a portion of the duodenum at one end and a portion of the esophagus at the other. In a study of all total gastrectomies up to 1929, Finney and Rienhoff3emphasized the importance of Kronlein's definition, since they found that more than half of the operations recorded as total gastrectomies