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Introduction

This book is the fourth in a series of publications, inaugurated in 1984 after the first World Congress of O.E.S.O.

It was a wager of the most challenging and venturesome sort, when I first imagined that it would be possible to bring together all of these specialists, from all disciplines, concerning one single organ, to participate in an approach that they were not familiar with. I sought not a conference and I asked neither for an exhaustive commentary, nor a paper that they would have chosen themselves.

No! I proposed an original and more difficult procedure: each one, an indisputable specialist of high reputation, was asked to agree not to report on his or her very own experience, but rather to make use of this experience to seek, and find, the elements of an elective synthesis on an extremely precise and limited point, granting the material for a response to a single and most specific question.

For this Fourth O.E.S.O. World Congress, as for the first three, at the time when I was devising the 300 questions focusing on the specific theme, which this time was 'The Esophageal Mucosa', to answer each question, I thought to ask either a personal friend, or even a known author whom I had maybe never met, but whose work had impressed me.

It was then that the members of the Permanent Scientific Committee of O.E.S.O. fulfilled their role, and how prominent indeed it was, to polish the terminology of the questions and widen their potential scope, or to suggest a more appropriate contributor.

And in this way, other valuable specialists were contacted to participate.

This collective enthusiasm has made the elaboration of this book possible, as it significantly contributed to the smooth and original functioning of the Congress: everyone fully played the challenging game asked of them, and offered a unique and essential part to construct this kind of encyclopedia that now covers a fascinating area of esophagology.

I thank each one of them.

I am grateful to each one for all that was given towards this effort.

I am proud to have Guido Tytgat, Tom DeMeester, and Jean-Paul Galmiche with me as co-editors of this fourth volume: they bestow upon it their vast reputations, and all that their exceptional importance represents to the scientific world.

They are also very close friends, who have known how to help me efficiently in each step of the laborious preparation of the Congress that was at the origin of this book.

And it is a privilege for the Scientific Director of O.E.S.O. to watch this polydisciplinary locomotive, charged with future projects, now running at full speed driven by the ardent force in each of us, and to know that it will go far in finding fascinating areas yet to be explored in our splendid and complex specialty.

Robert Giuli, MD, FACS Professor of Surgery

Professor of Surgery Scientific Director of O.E.S.O.

Very much apart, because her participation has been exceptionally remarkable, I would like to pay particular tribute to Michèle Liégeon.

An attentive and precious assistant, keenly intelligent, communicatively enthusiastic, endowed with matchless meticulousness in her quest for excellence, she has been outstandingly efficient in giving this volume, as the preceding ones, a certain perfection that, I hope, the reader will easily perceive.