SMALL bowel obstruction has always been a serious problem, but the over-all mortality rate, which in 1908 was reported by Scudder1 to be 60%, has successively fallen to 44%, as reported by McIver2 in 1932, and to 17.9%, after the introduction of the intestinal decompression method in 1933, as reported by Wangensteen3 in 1939. More recently, Moses4 in 1946 reported a mortality rate of 8%, but in his series he did not include cases of congenital atresia, which are notoriously associated with a high mortality rate; West and Schetlin,5 though they included neither cases of atresia nor of mesenteric thrombosis, reported a mortality rate of 16.3% in 1950. ANALYSIS OF CLINICAL MATERIAL Our clinical material is drawn from a nonuniversity hospital of 375 beds and 75 bassinets during the period of 1945 to 1951. During this time, there were 98,590 hospital admissions, of which 43,490