[Surgical treatment of acute cholecystitis (authors' transl)]

On the basis of 15 resp. 25 years of experience with surgical treatment of acute cholecystitis the authors evaluate their results of urgent and acute operations in 1.080 patients in whom the intensive conservative treatment of acute attacks did not sufficiently influence the symptoms of acute cholecystitis. From this group of 1.080 patients operated on urgently or acutely 21 died, the operative mortality being thus 1.9%. The mortality rate was highest after urgent operations where from 58 patients 10 died, the mortality being 17.2%. From the group of 889 acute cases operated on during 12, 24 or 48 hours following hospital admission, only 5 patients died, the mortality rate being 0.6%.