SINCE 1882, when Gussenbauer17 first successfully treated a pancreatic pseudocyst by marsupialization, these lesions have received exclusive surgical therapy. Numerous basically similar classifications of cysts of the pancreas have been proposed,* but that classification first described by Mahorner and Mattson19 is the most widely accepted. From this etiological classification of pancreatic cysts, the two groups which by incidence derived by far the greatest prominence in therapy are those cysts resulting from trauma and the neoplastic cysts. Much the commoner disease entity of these two are those cysts resulting from trauma (chemical, physical, or bacterial). Since the bulk of these so-called traumatic cysts (which are devoid of any epithelial lining, and so are not true cysts) have been found unassociated with any history whatever of abdominal trauma, the term pseudocyst has been widely adapted in its place.†
The optimum disposition of the neoplastic cyst of the pancreas is not