Job, chap. 30, verse 27: "My bowels boiled, and rested not; the days of affliction prevented me." Job, chap. 32, verse 19: "Behold, my belly is as wine which hath no vent; it is ready to burst like new bottles." Tropical sprue as a medical problem is confined to certain sharply delineated geographic areas. As a problem in pathologic physiology, however, the disease has been shown in recent years to be of considerable general importance and interest. The recent reviews of Castle, Rhoads, Lawson and Payne,1 of Fairley2 and of Reed3 have all dealt at length with the history and symptomatology of tropical sprue. Consideration of these reports, however, reveals that a certain difference of opinion exists as to the most effective means of treating sprue and indeed as to the basic mechanism of the disease process. The patients reported on by Reed and by Fairley were