[History of surgical treatment of appendicitis]

Abstract

Most of the history of appendicitis and appendectomy has been made during the past two centuries. Jacopo Berengario da Carpi gave the first description of this structure in 1522. Gabriele Fallopio, in 1561, appears to have been the first writer to compare the appendix to a worm. In1579 Caspar Bauhin proposed the ingenious theory that the appendix served in intrauterine life as a receptacle for the faexes. Many of anatomists added more or less insignificant ideas concerning the structure of the appendix and entered upon useless controversy concerning the name, function, position of the appendix vermiformis. The first successful appendectomy was performed in 1735 by Claudius Amyand. Geillaume Dupuytren considered that acute inflammation of the right side of the abdomen arose from disease of the caecum and not the appendix. As surgeons were wary of opening the abdomen for examination, early stages of appendicitis remained unknown. John Parkinson was able to give a good description of fatal appendicitis in 1812. Surgeons began draining localised abscesses which had already formed. In 1880 Robert Lawson Tait made the first diagnosis of appendicitis and surgically removed the appendix. In 1886 Reginald Heber Fitz published a study on appendicitis and named the procedure an appendectomy. In 1889, Tait split open and drained an inflamed appendix without removing it. Charles McBurney proposed his original muscle splitting operation in 1893 and this was modified by Robert Fulton Weir in 1900. Today we have a multiplicity of signs and symptoms, helping to diagnose appendicitis, and there are a lot of techniques for operation with little essential difference throughout. Kurt Semm performed the first laparoscopic appendectomy in 1981 which became a new gold standard in surgical treatment of acute and chronic appendicitis.