A photograph of Dr. William Seaman Bainbridge, downloaded from eBay where the original was for sale.

Note: The Space Questionnaire has concluded, and a new study begins...

Chronic Intestinal Stasis

This is the name of a disease that was believed to exist a century ago, but may have been a terrible mistake, made by some of the leading surgeons of the time.  This wiki will be used during April 2013 to consider how a wiki format can be used to assemble a personal expert system, based on the expertise and opinions of one specific individual.  This is a research case study, designed to develop an approach that could be used for personality capture and emulation, or for other information preservation and management purposes.

This case study will focus on the work of Dr. William Seaman Bainbridge, my grandfather, who was the most forceful advocate for diagnosis and treatment of this pseudodisease in the United States.  He began an article in the January 24, 1914 issue of the New York Medical Journal by naming the British doctor who influenced his own thinking, and quoting his definition:

"In a recent address before the French Surgical Congress, Sir Arbuthnot Lane, of London, defined chronic intestinal stasis as follows: 'By chronic intestinal stasis I mean that the passage of food along the alimentary canal takes place with such slowness that there is formed an excess of toxic matter, especially in the small intestine.  Consequently, the blood flow pours into the transforming and excretory organs a quantity of poison larger than they can eliminate.  From this it results that all the tissues of the body, drenched in this blood rich in poisons, degenerate and offer a diminished resistance to infection.  A defective drainage has consequences which are deleterious to the organism in general as well as to the individual tissues of which it is composed.'"

Chronic Intestinal Stasis is a good example, because the concept made sense to doctors and patients alike, surgical treatment required advanced technical expertise, yet in most cases the disease did not in fact exist.

Go to the CIS table of Contents.

======WIlliam Sims Bainbridge CV====== 

Curriculum Vitae   -  Online Datasets  - Recent Online Publications 

41 Early Online Publications