IN A GENERAL hospital serving a rural community, we are often confronted with the problem of major surgery in aged persons. In 1951, at the Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital, 10% of the major operations performed were on patients 80 years of age or over.* One of us (being a surgeon) must often disrupt the physiologic processes of persons in the higher decades of life and the other (an internist) is frequently asked to evaluate and help to repair the disruption in these aged patients. Many times we seemed unable to predict how much surgical trauma could be withstood by such patients and how their convalescence would be affected by the changes of senescence. Although there are many published studies on this subject,† none answered all our questions. METHOD OF STUDY The hospital records of all patients more than 69 years of age undergoing major surgery in 1952 and 1953 were