Ever since the time of Billroth, Hodgkin's disease, by general agreement, has been excluded from the category of surgical diseases. The reason for considering the disease as nonsurgical was due not so much to the technical difficulties entailed as to the unfavorable end-results. The fact that pathologists subsequently demonstrated that the disease might begin as an isolated lesion did not alter the surgical status of the disease. Apprisal of the occurrence of isolated lesions failed to modify previous opinion, because the organs described as the seats of primary involvement, such as the spleen, the liver, the bone-marrow and the lungs, either did not lend themselves to surgical extirpation or did not lead to clinical manifestations that might have permitted early recognition. In the past few years, a number of patients with isolated lymphogranulomatosis of the gastro-intestinal tract have been treated by radical resection, generally under a mistaken clinical diagnosis. The