Sir.—Playing the priority game is always a little risky in clinical medicine. They who claim in print to be the first to describe a syndrome, cure a rare disease, or perform a particular operation will, unless they have done their homework well, find themselves the victims of gleeful challenges in the letters to the editor column. Takebayashi et al1 assert that their patient with duodenal atresia and gastric perforation is "the second cured by operation," after Ogawa's report2 of "the first successful operation" in 1966.
When I was Chief Surgical Resident on the Pediatric Surgical Service of Thomas V. Santulli, MD, at New York's Babies Hospital in 1962, I had the opportunity to repair a gastric perforation and to bypass a duodenal atresia with annular pancreas in a premature female infant. Although Takebayashi et al cite the article in which this case was described,3 they may