Title: The Chilean Society of Gastroenterology and The Chilean Digestive Endoscopic Association: A brief history
Abstract: The Chilean Society of Gastroenterology was founded in 1938 as a local program of the Societe Internationale de Gastroenterologie. The early development of our society had numerous difficulties, but the enthusiasm of the members carried the society through turbulent years. Early publications were generally based on case reports or were inconsistent, often being retrospective reviews. In those early years, the relationship between GI clinicians and surgeons had multiple areas of conflict. In the decade of the 1940s, some chiefs of surgical departments prohibited entrance to their services to physicians of great experience in the treatment of the ileum, which often involved intestinal intubations. The surgeons believed that “those rubber tubes disguise the peritonitis.” Other physicians were reviled because they offered endoscopic examination of the upper GI tract that the surgeons said “wasted the time and caused perforation of the esophagus.” Soon however, the practice of gastroenterology improved with the participation of radiologists, pathologists, and basic scientists. There was an increasing interest in both cholelithiasis and gallbladder cancer because Chile has the highest rates of incidence in the world of both diseases. Research in these problems generated many publications, most of them in the Revista Medica de Chile, which was founded in 1872, the oldest Spanish medical publication. The early years of the Society of Gastroenterology were lean indeed, with only 5 Chilean reports published that used clinical experiences with scientific experimental methods and related them to the basic sciences. However, during those years several gastroenterologists went to Europe and the United States for fellowships and introduced important advances when they returned to Chile. The formation of the Interamerican Association of Gastroenterology in 1946 had a remarkable impact on the development of the specialty of gastroenterology in Chile. The constant scientific relationship between Latin America and North America with students heading north and visiting professors heading south increased the climate of academic gastroenterology. The Chilean Society of Gastroenterology organized its first postgraduate course in 1952. Eleven years later, the First Chilean Congress of Gastroenterology was held in the city of Viña del Mar. Among the foreign invited professors were Franz Ingelfinger, Carlos H. Resano, Marvin Pollard, Arthur Voorhess, Nicholas Hightower, and Yuzo Shibata. Nine years later, the Second Congress was held, and the Third Congress 4 years later; since then the Congress has been an annual event. In 1989, the Chilean Association of Digestive Endoscopy (ACHED) was founded and endoscopy became an important subspecialty in Chile. In November 2001, Santiago was host to the XXVIII Chilean Congress of Gastroenterology, XII Chilean Congress of Endoscopy, and X Chilean Congress of Hepatology. The possibility that Chile could mimic the Japanese strides in early gastric cancer began to be realized in 1968 when Professor Tadashige Murakami, a distinguished pathologist and surgeon from Japan, held a conference on early gastric cancer in Santiago. Several prominent Chilean gastroenterologists were subsequently invited by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) to travel to Japan to learn techniques of screening and surveillance with upper intestinal endoscopy. At that time, the mortality rate of gastric cancer in Chile had a terrible prognosis, as evidenced by the publication in 1969 of 700 cases with a 3% survival on 5-year follow-up. Because of the enthusiasm that Chilean gastroenterologists brought back from their sojourns in Japan (Dr. Attila Csendes, Jaime Kinger, Pedro Llorens), the Chilean Association for Early Gastric Cancer was begun in 1970. In 1971, Revista Medica de Chile published the first 4 cases of early gastric cancer diagnosed by endoscopy in the country, two of them studied by Aldo Luccini and the two others by Pedro Llorens. Since that time there has been a close scientific collaboration between Japan and Chile. Three gastric cancer centers were created, one in San Borja-Arriaran Hospital in Santiago, and the other two in Valparaiso, which has a very high mortality rate from gastric cancer. The results of early screening soon surpassed the initial expectations, and the current discovery rate and the rate of survival of gastric cancer parallels the results in Japan. During the past 15 years, the scientific cooperation between the governments of Japan and Chile have resulted in an international postgraduate course for Latino-American physicians in which over 700 highly qualified specialists in radiology, endoscopy, gastroenterology, and pathology have attended a full-time study period of 1 month in Santiago. The official publication of the Chilean Society of Gastroenterology, ACHED, and the Chilean Association of Hepatology is now the journal Gastroenterologica Latinoamericana, which was first published in 1990. This journal currently carries excellent original articles and reviews of new techniques, as well as case reports. The Interamerican Society of Digestive Endoscopy (SIED) was founded in September 1973 in Buenos Aires under the presidency of Dr. Horacio Rubio, who worked along with Jose Martins Job (Brazil), Jose Ramires Degollado (Mexico), Henry Colcher (United States), and Marcos Matos-Villalobos (Venezuela). Chile has been one of the founding members of SIED and remains in the forefront of endoscopic education in South America. The current level of gastroenterology and GI endoscopy in Chile is a reflection of the growth of gastroenterology worldwide. Our country now has world-class gastroenterologists in all specialties and can provide the most modern and innovative techniques for our patients.