Inflammatory bowel disease up to 1932

Inflammatory bowel diseases have been a major interest of generations of Mount Sinai Hospital gastroenterologists. Although clinical descriptions of diarrhea with or without blood go back thousands of years, clear distinctions between enteritis and ulcerative colitis were possible only in the 19th century. At that time, many case reports were published of, in retrospect, classical regional enteritis. The term "ulcerative colitis" dates from 1888; the introduction of the electric sigmoidoscope soon after made it possible to make proper diagnosis of ulcerative colitis and distinguish it from infective dysentery, membranous mucous or catarrhal colitis, and nervous diarrhea. Doctors at The Mount Sinai Hospital adopted this diagnostic approach in the 1870s and 1880s, and were particularly interested in patients with tuberculosis-like ileocecal disease without tubercle bacilli. Articles were written by Weiner in 1914, Moschcowitz and Wilensky in 1923 and 1927, and Goldfarb and Suissman in 1931. Dr. A.A. Berg, in 1925, encouraged his assistant Leon Ginzburg to conduct a study of the inflammatory granulomatous diseases of the bowel, when Ginzburg and Gordon Oppenheimer were working in Dr. Paul Klemperer's laboratory. Initial reports came in 1927 and 1928, but Ginzburg and Oppenheimer "in conjunction with Dr. Burrill B. Crohn" presented a definitive paper, "Non-specific Granulomata of the Intestine," on May 2, 1932, to the American Gastro-Enterological Association. On May 13, 1932, Dr. Crohn presented a paper on "Terminal Ileitis" to the American Medical Association; this was published later that year with the title "Regional Ileitis: A Pathologic and Chronic Entity," under the authorship of Crohn, Ginzburg and Oppenheimer.