Laparoscopic Cholangiography

Abstract

Gallstones were first described by Alexander Trallianus, a Greek physician in the fifth century [1]. It was not until the early 1600s that their pathologic significance became known when Francis Glisson related from personal experience the symptoms of biliary colic followed by icterus, and providéd accounts of the expulsion of stones through the intestinal tract. The first surgical treatment described was in 1676 when Joenisius extracted gallstones from a biliary fistula of the abdominal wall following spontaneous drainage of an abscess. In the mid 1700s, Jean Louis Petit advocated percutaneous cholecystostomy in cases where the gallbladder had become adherent to the abdominal wall. But it was John Bobbs of Indianapolis in 1867 who performed the first elective open cholecystostomy on a patient who, during exploration for an abdominal mass, was found to have hydrops of the gallbladder [2]. In 1882 Carl Langenbuch [3] of Berlin performed the first human cholecystectomy in a 43-year-old patient with a 16-year history of biliary colic.