Benign tumors of the gastrointestinal tract are not frequent, and lipomas constitute but a small portion of those which do occur. Staemmler,1 in a series of 17,000 consecutive postmortem examinations, found only 9 lipomas, an incidence of 0.05 per cent. In a series of 3,924 consecutive autopsies at the Mayo Clinic, Comfort2 found 20 intestinal lipomas, an incidence of 0.5 per cent. The discrepancy in these two series may have been due to the difference in size of the series or to the degree of care in searching for lipomas.
From time to time there have been reports in the literature of spontaneous elimination of gastrointestinal lipomas. In the sixty-five years from 1870 to 1935, 15 cases have been reported, 1 reported by Ninaus3 might not be properly included because an invagination of the intestine occurred and the tumor was expelled, together with the involved portion of