Foreign Bodies in the Gullet

The treatment of patients with foreign bodies impacted in the gullet is a branch of surgery that has in recent years undergone a complete change. Although the oesophagus and stomach were examined in the living subject by means of a tube as far back as the middle of the eighteenth century, clinical application of this method has been developed only during the twentieth. Before that development the means of dealing with such accidents were distinctly primitive. The obstructing mass was pushed down or hooked up by & blind instrumentation. If this failed, an external oesophagotomy in the neck was necessary. Both procedures were fraught with considerable risk, and