Ever since Boston's late great Surgeon Harvey Gushing showed that impulses from the brain, communicated through the nervous system to the digestive tract, could cause peptic ulcers, thousands of ulcer victims have had their vagus nerve severed by surgery to break the chain of cause & effect. It usually worked, but sometimes the ulcers recurred—presumably because mental stress had found a new route to the stomach, but how, nobody knew. Lately physicians have noticed that heavy doses of ACTH or cortisone may start old ulcers up again.
At Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, where Gushing did much of his work, a team...
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