History of reconstruction after total gastrectomy.

Nearly a century has passed since Schlatter carried out the first successful total gastrectomy and antecolic end-to-side oesophagojejunostomy in 1897 in Zurich. Actually, fourteen years before, Conner attempted a total gastrectomy, but his patient died on the operating table. From the first success, a large number of different procedures have populated the worldwide literature, with a lot of papers reporting "original' techniques or data about the functional outcome.