In this era of antibiotics and chemotherapeutic agents the incidence of postoperative wound infections has been reduce to a negligible percentage. This is due not only to these new agents but also to improvement in the efficiency of personnel, sterilization of instruments and fields, and improved surgical techniques that follow the basic concepts of good surgery and good tissue care. Against this background, there occur, rarely, certain infectious complications of normal surgical treatment. These complications, at first slow-moving, are insidious, relentless, and almost totally resistant to the usual modes of treatment. All concerned, the surgeon, the physician, the bacteriologist, and the pathologist, may well conclude that much is yet to be done in the field of bacteriology in assessing the specific organism or organisms causing such an infection and in determining the best specific therapy to combat them. All types of chronic gangrene, although characterized by certain differences, are caused