The surgical treatment of uncomplicated benign lesions of the stomach and duodenum has reached a high state of efficiency and standardization. The various complications, however, which may develop in direct connection with gastric and duodenal ulcer, such as acute and chronic perforation, obstruction, deformity, malignant degeneration, and hemorrhage, present added problems to the surgeon; one of the most important of these is hemorrhage.
Gastric hemorrhage has been the occasion of more confusion in diagnosis, uncertainty in therapeutic indications, and irrationality in treatment, both medical and surgical, than perhaps any other gastric condition. The number of cases seen in which an erroneous interpretation of symptoms has led to incorrect suggestion for treatment, resulting in failure to protect the patient against further hemorrhage, illustrates the necessity of persistent study of the subject. This paper is concerned chiefly with two groups of cases, first, those in which operation has proved unsatisfactory because of