ABSTRACT
In September 1874, professor James F.P. McConnell performed an autopsy of a 20-year-old Chinese carpenter who died from severe hepatic disease in the Medical College Hospital in Calcutta, India. He found many narrow and flattened worms in the bile ducts, and after careful analysis realized that this was a new species. The morbid anatomy has unambiguously indicated that the presence of the worms in the bile ducts resulted in the acute and extensive structural degeneration of the organ and obstruction of the biliary channels that proved fatal. J.F.P. McConnell published these data in 1875 in The Lancet. T. Spenser Cobbold described these flukes as a new species Distoma sinense. 1 His paper was published in the same journal 4 weeks later. Soon, there were a number of reports about the same helminthiasis in the neighboring countries. In Japan, where the disease has been known since the Middle Ages, Erwin von Baeltz identified, based on morphological data, two species of liver flukes: slightly pigmented small (believed endemic to Japan) and large, with copious amounts of pigment (as common in China).
