The results of 15 years of sclerotherapy for acute variceal haemorrhage are reviewed retrospectively. One hundred and seventeen patients with portal hypertension received a total of 217 injections. Haemorrhage was controlled in 93 per cent of admissions. The mortality per injection was under 12 per cent, and the total admission mortality was 18 per cent. Even where a subsequent shunt was impracticable, sclerotherapy provided useful palliation with few serious complications.

Story generation is the problem of automatically selecting a sequence of events that meet a set of criteria and can be told as a story. Story generation is knowledge-intensive; traditional story generators rely on a priori defined domain models about fictional worlds, including characters, places, and actions that can be performed. Manually authoring the domain models is costly and thus not scalable. We present a novel class of story generation system that can generate stories in an unknown domain. Our system (a) automatically learns a domain model by crowdsourcing a corpus of narrative examples and (b) generates stories by sampling from the space defined by the domain model. A large-scale evaluation shows that stories generated by our system for a previously unknown topic are comparable in quality to simple stories authored by untrained humans

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1455microscopically that the degree of dilatation of the pyloric canal used (4 cm) causes any morphological change in the mucosa or the musculature of the wall. On the other hand, clinical, radiological, and endoscopic evidence shows that the intricate mechanism of the antropyloroduodenal channel is not destroyed, as, for example, in pyloroplasty. Bile reflux was not seen clinically, and no patient developed a postoperative gastric ulcer. We believe that patients return to normal feeding earlier and that the incidence of undesirable sequelae is lower after TV and PD compared with patients in whom one of the conventional drainage procedures have been performed. Further study will be required before any real comparison can be made with the results after PGV.Goligher,'1 reporting on a series of 117 patients who underwent PGV and were followed up for five to eight years, recorded a similar overall result in terms of Visick gradingnamely, 75),, in categories I plus II. As compared with vagotomy and drainage he concluded that PGV was followed by less dumping and diarrhoea but did not offer appreciably better overall results. Mackey et al,13 reporting on a series of 115 patients who had been treated by PGV and followed up for one to five years in a district general hospital, recorded a satisfactory result in 9100. Their incidence of recurrent ulceration was 5-1°o after an average interval of two years and that of new gastric ulceration 2 50 after an average of four years.PGV is a technically exacting procedure attended by anxieties related to the vascularity of the lesser curvature of the stomach.'441 By contrast, TV and PD is both safe and economic in terms of time and manpower and complies with Dragstedt's view'6 that "the operation for elective duodenal ulcer surgery must be safe in the hands of the average surgeon using a technique that is acceptably effective." Journal, 1979Journal, , 1, 1455Journal, -1456 Summary and conclusions Out of 400 patients who underwent proximal gastric vagotomy (PGV), three developed lesser-curve necrosis (LCN) leading to perforation within the first seven days. In each case diagnosis was delayed but the patient survived after a second operation. In each an associated Nissen fundoplication had been carried out; we used the combined operation in only 33 patients. Delayed LCN occurred in a patient who had undergone splenectomy at the time of the PGV and in a fifth patient treated elsewhere who had also undergone fundoplication. These findings indicate that early postoperative gastric distension with gas, not readily voided after fundoplication, may aggravate local vascular factors and predispose to LCN. We suggest that PGV combined with fundoplication may be dangerous.

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