O Rare Appendectomy

Many a U. S. appendix is still marked "Do not disturb"; but many another is no longer at home. Last week a famed specialist suggested (by implication) that more than one appendectomy he knows about was no better than a kidnapping. Several years ago, Mayo Clinic's famed Digestion Expert Walter Clement Alvarez started a notebook in which he collected experiences of patients whose appendixes had been reft from them. Last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association he told what he had learned from 385 patients. Of these, 130 had suffered at least one sharp bellyache "suggesting appendicitis," and after operation, 87 of them were cured.

But 255 had never experienced these typical acute attacks. Some of them: a college girl who "was rushed to the operating table so fast she hadn't a chance to impress the surgeon with the fact that she had just been on ... 'a walnut fudge bust' "; a man "who had just had a violent argument with his wife"; several school teachers who "were worn out with fatigue"; a young woman who couldn't digest onions; "one girl who had simply vomited her dinner."

"The most remarkable story of all," continued Dr. Alvarez, "was told by a woman who gave as the only reason for her appendectomy the fact that on arriving in Los Angeles one day she found a big convention in full swing and all the hotels full. The only place in which she could find a bed was a hospital, so she took it and had her appendix out. She always wanted to have it done . . . sometime ... so why not then?"

In such appendectomies, he went on, "the patient is supposed to have everything to gain and nothing to lose. Would to God that this were true! . . . Actually 60 of the 255 patients . . . were decidedly the worse for the operation. . . . Only two were cured."

"It would seem," concluded Dr. Alvarez, "that true chronic appendicitis, instead of being regarded as the commonest intra-abdominal disease, should be thought of as one of the rarest."

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