THE MINOR FORMS OF PULMONARY EMBOLISM AFTER ABDOMINAL OPERATIONS

Abstract

During the last few years the opinion that embolism is a more important factor in the production of postoperative pulmonary complications than has heretofore been suspected has gradually been gaining ground. Since 1920, representatives of several of the largest surgical clinics in America and Europe have accepted this conclusion (Boland,¹Farrar,²Cutler and Hunt³). In January, 1922, DeQuervain⁴of Switzerland stated that following operations upon the stomach, "three fourths of the true postoperative deaths are due to lung complications—emboli, pneumonia and lung gangrene," and that in a good share of the cases of so-called pneumonia, the processes are really embolic in nature. We⁵arrived at this conclusion in 1919, after having studied all the postoperative pulmonary complications and cases of femoral thrombophlebitis that had occurred in the gynecologic service of the Johns Hopkins Hospital during the preceding thirty years. At that time we expressed the