Littre's hernia - clinical and review of the history

In 1700, the French surgeon Alexandre de Littre described for the first tim e a new form of inguinal hernia. This hernia varied from the known forms of hernias in its clinical course and in the postmortem examination results p erformed by Littre himself. The characteristic feature of this hernia was t he fact that the entire circumference of the bowel wall was not part of the hernial sac, but only the antimesenteric part of the intestinal wall. The underlying pathomechanism was explained 100 years later by Meckel. In a sci entific paper about hernias some years earlier, Richter described the intes tinal wall hernia, and this initiated the confusing use of the clinical ent ity known as the Richter-Littre hernia in Germany. In this case report we d escribe the historic development of this entity.