DEVELOPMENT OF DOUBLE-LUMENED TUBE FOR INTESTINAL INTUBATION

In 1934 the late William Osler Abbott and I¹ introduced small intestinal intubation as a practical clinical procedure. It was not the first time that the human small bowel had been intubated or that the significance of such a procedure had been appreciated. It was merely the first time that a technic had been described that permitted the ready accomplishment of the desired objectives. This was rendered possible by the development of a double-lumened rubber tube and the attachment at its distal end of a collapsible balloon.

PREVIOUS HISTORY  Although we were not familiar with his work until shortly before our original publication, Scheltema,² a Netherlands pediatrician, in 1908, twenty-six years earlier, had accomplished in children what he termed "permeation or automatic sounding of the alimentary tract." The idea that such intubation could be accomplished passively (without activity on the part of the operator) occurred to him as