In this year of 2012, we note a number of centennials with varying degrees of enthusiasm: the 100th anniversaries of the sinking of the Titanic in the North Atlantic, the ending of the Qing Dynasty in China, the misfire of the British expedition to the South Pole, and the first baseball game in Boston's Fenway Park among others—including one of special significance to pediatric surgeons and the thousands of babies saved because of a discovery reported in a German journal 100 years ago. In this year, the pediatric surgical community will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Conrad Ramstedt's report, "Zur Operation der angeborenen Pylorusstenose", in the October 1912 issue of Medizinische Klinik (Fig. 1) in which he first describes the operation that Willis Potts called, "the most satisfactory procedure in the field of pediatric surgery". Indeed, there is probably no procedure in all of surgery that is more satisfying than the Ramstedt pyloromyotomy.
展开▼
