EXPERIMENTAL PERIPHERAL GANGRENE

The intense interest which in recent years has centered about the problems presented by peripheral vascular disease has thrown into painfully clear relief the meager limits to present knowledge of the nature of these maladies. Particularly is this true of the more obscure presenile peripheral arterial disturbances. Clinician and experimentalist alike appreciate the blindness of the fight being waged with thrombo-angiitis obliterans. Clinically, physicians seem to be merely marking time, while experimentally they are little nearer the solution of the etiology of the disease than they were when the disease was first described in detail by Buerger.

This is quite intelligible when one considers the fact that there is as yet no clear knowledge either of the character of the initial lesion in the disease or of its chronological development. Patients present themselves in what is essentially the end stage of the process, and the physician's concept of what has