In recent years, biopsy of the small intestine has become very popular. The jejunal mucosa has been examined in a large variety of conditions, ranging from pernicious anemia to dermatitis herpetiformis, and aberrations have been detailed in a bevy of reports. Among these, however, the descriptions of a sprue-like lesion in illnesses other than sprue command the closest scrutiny, since the lesion is considered by some authorities to be diagnostic of sprue alone. Rubin1 has enforced this claim by failing to find the sprue morphology in intestinal biopsies from patients with conditions alleged to be associated with the lesion, and by finding normal mucosa in a host of diseases associated with steatorrhea.
One of the most widely appreciated associations between sprue-like mucosa and nonsprue resulted from the observations of Conrad and co-workers2 in 25 cases of infectious hepatitis, in American soldiers stationed in Korea. With this work, there