Every physician interested in gastric disease today is desirous of knowing whether any advantage exists in the use of histamine instead of the Ewald meal as a stimulus to gastric secretion. The problems presented are: (1) whether this new test is so much more helpful diagnostically that it should replace the Ewald meal; (2) whether there is any one field of gastro-intestinal disease in which it can give information of outstanding value, other than in differentiating true and false anacidity, a field in which its value has been accepted since the work of Gompertz and Vorhaus,1Andresen,2and Bockus and Bank,3and (3) whether Bloomfield and Polland4are justified in attaching to determinations of volume and acidity an importance great enough to distinguish, at times, benign from malignant lesions. With the idea of gaining an answer to these questions, parallel data were collected concerning 120 patients