January 18, 1957
My dear Clarence:
Your letter of January the 10th is before me. A careful reading of the paper
I sent you, I believe, will indicate that most of the questions you raised there-in have been answered. I believe that it would ill behoove me as one of the Editors of Surgery to initiate the plan of using illustrations in the Re-Appraisal Section, even though such a scheme may come into vogue at some future date. It was my reaction that my own paper was a bit long. Therefore, with your approval, I would like to have it stand as it is written. On reading the paper, however, there are two minor changes I would like to make.  Perhaps you will be good enough to write those in. On page 3, line 6, I believe the last word in that sentence should be changed from large to some. In other words, the sentence would now read "is dependent in some measure on" etc. Also on page 5, in the first paragraph, line 5, I note that there is a word omitted. The word area should appear after the word secreting such that the sentence should now read "preservation of the strong pepsin secreting area of the lesser curvature" etc.
Many surgeons have been dubious over the protective virtues of segmental resection for duodenal ulcer. That is the chief reason this paper was written. And as this paper indicates, we have great enthusiasm for segmental resection, and our experience both in the laboratory and on the clinical side suggests that, by comparison, tubular resection is not as good an operation.
To add anything to the paper beyond this would take an enormous amount of labor and would delay the publication of this present effort considerably. A retraction on the score of tubular resection is in order now. Furthermore, the paper will be complemented a great deal by the experimental paper by Thal which Mrs. Avis is planning for the same issue. She has written me that she plans the Thal paper for the April issue. Is it going to be possible to place this briefer paper in the Re-Appraisal Section in the April issue?
Regards!
Sincerely,
Owen