VIDEO: What’s in a name? How a common cause for GI bleeding bears the name Mallory-Weiss
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
In this Endo-Sketch, a Healio video series on clinical conditions named after famous colleagues, Klaus Mergener, MD, of the University of Washington School of Medicine, discusses the origin of Mallory-Weiss syndrome.
According to Mergener, these partial thickness tears of the esophageal mucosa and submucosa are named for Boston physicians Kenneth Mallory and Soma Weiss. Mallory, whose father Frank Burr Mallory described Mallory bodies in alcoholic cirrhosis, graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1926 and spent most of his professional career at the pathology institute founded by and named after his father. Weiss, a Hungarian immigrant, earned his doctorate from Cornell in 1923 and later became physician-in-chief at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston.
Mallory and Weiss were the first to describe the condition in 1929 in a case series, and it was not mentioned again until 1953, when Mallory wrote a New England Journal of Medicine review. It was then that the medical community began describing the Mallory-Weiss syndrome as a major cause for upper gastrointestinal bleeding.
“As William Haubrich remarked in his own review of the history of the Mallory-Weiss syndrome, it is somewhat ironical that these two prominent physicians who made several important contributions to the pathology and cardiovascular literature are now mostly remembered for a small case series on GI bleeding which they probably deemed relatively trivial at the time,” Mergener said.
References:
Collapse
Healio Interview
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts