Eighty-six years ago today, Burrill B. Crohn, Leon Ginzburg, and Gordon D. Oppenheimer published a paper titled Regional Ileitis – A Pathologic and Clinical Entity in the Journal of the American Medical Association (vol. 99, no. 16, pp 1323-1329, October 15, 1932). Honoring the importance of this report, the article was later reprinted as a Landmark Article in The Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine (vol 67, no. 3, pp 263-268, May 2006). We provide the original JAMA article here for users interested in reading this influential publication in its original form. Note: the reprinted version in the Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine has better print quality. The picture of B.B. Crohn is credited to Wikipedia.
Comment: I appreciate history as I grow older. Also, it is important to read original published reports to avoid misquoting or perpetuating misunderstandings. Interesting note: As described in Wikipedia, Crohn always preferred the medically descriptive terms “regional ileitis” and “regional enteritis” to “Crohn’s disease”, but he was not able to prevent the appropriation of his name for the disease.
Without providing much detail, B.B. Crohn’s article mentions efforts to determine if Mycobacterium tuberculosis was involved in the regional ileitis cases he described including culture for M. tuberculosis, inoculation of lymph node homogenates from five patients into guinea pigs, rabbits, and chickens, and acid-fast staining of tissue sections. He concludes that M. tuberculosis was not a cause of these cases of regional ileitis. However, he never mentions the 1913 report by Dalziel or makes any mention of Mycobacterium paratuberculosis or the similarities of regional ileitis in humans to that of cattle, as described by H.A. Johne in 1895. How might history be different had Dr. Crohn mentioned the possibility of M. a. paratuberculosis (MAP)?