Indigestion historical perspective

Indigestion is an old english word meaning lack of digestion. Dyspepsia symptoms have been recognized since the birth of medicine, however, the underlying pathogenesis of dyspepsia only began to be appreciated when Baillie in 1799 first described the anatomy and symptoms of gastric ulcer disease. The development of barium x-ray radiology, by Cannon in 1897, led to the clinical recognition of peptic ulcer disease and its relationship with its symptoms. Walter Alvarez at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN was the first to apply the term functional dyspepsia in 1916 to describe patients with ulcer-like symptoms and a normal X-ray.

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