Amnesia in modern surgery: revisiting Wangensteen's landmark studies of small bowel obstruction.

Before the publications of Owen Wangensteen and his colleagues in the early 1930s, bowel obstruction was almost always fatal, and its treatment was ineffectual.Patients rarely survived surgical attempts to relieve the obstruction.Although other investigators were active in the field, the understanding of the pathophysiology of obstruction belongs almost entirely to Wangensteen.

Prefrontal cortex aspiration in pups and juvenile rats: behavioural changes and recovery of function.

Male Wistar rats sustaining prefrontal cortex aspiration or sham operation at 6 days or 30 days of age were submitted to the following behavioural tests: open-field, acquisition and retention of two-way active as well as passive avoidance tasks. In the open-field the locomotor activity proved enhanced in all the aspirated animals and this enhancement lasted for 30 days. In the two-day active avoidance task, an acquisition deficit was observed in both aspirated groups; but when retrained one month later, they were able to acquire the avoidance task like sham-operated rats and no difference appeared between the groups aspirated at 6 or at 30 days of age.

Similar effect of caerulein on intracranial self-stimulation in vagotomized and non-vagotomized rats.

Electrical stimulation eliciting self-stimulation behavior from postero-lateral hypothalamic implanted electrode was controlled by factors that control normal feeding. In this idea, lateral hypothalamic stimulation possessed an appetite whetting property and this is experienced as rewarding. The octapeptide cholecystokinin, a gut hormone, has been experimented upon to produce the complete behavioral sequence of satiety in rats.

Adrenal "incidentalomas". Need for surgery.

A series of eleven adrenal tumors is presented. Only one of the adrenal tumors showed evidence of endocrine function while eight tumors were incidentally discovered during radiologic evaluations. Surgical exploration was performed in all cases as the final diagnostic measure.