Surgeon Edwards Crisp and Valentino’s Syndrome

Abstract

Nearly two centuries ago, in 1843, the english surgeon Dr. Edwards Crisp was the first physician to report a study of gastric ulcer perforation, noting that it had such typical symptoms, with its classic triad of sudden-onset epigastric pain, tachycardia, and abdominal wall rigidity, that it was difficult to believe that anyone could make a mistake in making the correct diagnosis. Eighty-three years later, in 1926, the famous silent film actor Rudolph Valentino died in a New York hospital, according to has been published in multiple medical journals, due to “a famous medical failure much commented on and lamented in its time”, since upon his admission to the local hospital he would only have been diagnosed with acute appendicitis, an appendectomy being performed on a normal appendix, dying eight days later from acute peritonitis; autop-sy define this would have originated in a previously undiagnosed perforated gastric ulcer, thus giving rise to Valentino Syndrome, in which the fluids produced by a perforated gastroduodenal ulcer when moving through the right parietocolic gutter irritate the cecal appendix, showing symptoms that make it confused with the diagnosis of acute appendicitis. The hospital where Valentino was treated and operated on ur-gently was a teaching center for pre and postgraduate medical training, where its resident surgeons knew and practiced the ancient teachings of Dr. Crisp and the advances in gastric surgery, thereby providing him with satisfactory surgical care. It is possible to learn about what happened to Valentino through the medical epicrisis written by his surgeon. His unfortunate death was due to generalized sepsis on his eighth postoperative day at a time when antibiotic therapy had not yet been discovered.