TORSION OF THE OMENTUM: ITS CLINICAL IMPORTANCE

The great or gastrocolic omentum has never played a particularly prominent part in clinical surgery, its role generally being accepted rather as that of an inert structure with a function more or less vague and a relationship to clinical symptoms too remote to merit serious consideration in the diagnosis of abdominal conditions. Of late, however, in consequence of the rapid accumulation of reports and data relative to torsion of the omentum, this structure has assumed some degree of clinical importance, and it is significant of this altered status that at least one modern surgical text1has given prominent consideration to this disease in the differential diagnosis of acute appendicitis. Accordingly, the conclusion now seems justified that, under certain conditions, the omentum possesses inherent potentialities capable of initiating abdominal crises which demand differentiation from other and more familiar acute abdominal lesions. In an abstract physical sense, torsion of a structure