Historical Aspects of Anal Fissure Pathology

In her doctoral thesis, Willemsen (1963) quotes Boyer (1818) who points out in his paper on anorectal diseases that fissure-in-ano was first mentioned in medical literature in 1689. Frey (1943) claims that Boyer’s paper dates from 1825 and confirms that not only Louis Lemonnier in his “Traite de la fistule de l’anus ou du fondement” (1689) but also Raphael B. Sabatier has mentioned anal fissures in his “De la Medecine operatoire” (1824). This ostensibly negligible condition (Czerny 1903) creates “such extreme pain in the patient like no other with such tiny spatial dimensions” (Peters 1920).