Although congenital obstruction may occur at any level or in any degree along the entire gastro-intestinal tract, we shall confine our discussion to congenital obstruction of the duodenum.
Practically all writers on this subject agree that Calder recorded the first case of congenital duodenal occlusion in the Journal of Medical Essays, Edinburgh, in 1733. Cordes1 of New York, in 1901, reported fifty-seven cases including a case report of her own, this being generally accepted in the literature as the total number of cases reported to that year. On the contrary, we find that the oldest case in her record was that described in 1808 by Aubrey,2 and that she entirely overlooked Calder's case as well as the case of Daniel reported in 1765 in which there was absence of the heart, lungs, liver, pancreas, spleen and left kidney in addition to the duodenal malformation.
In 1905, Little and