The Story Behind Crohn and Ginzburg and Oppenheimer(CGO) Collaboration

Crohn, Ginzburg, and Oppenheimer all graduated from Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons and subsequently succeeded in becoming house staff at the Mount Sinai Hospital. Their careers were certainly lifted by their publications on Crohn's disease. Crohn became a private practice gastroenterologist.

Ginzburg continued at The Mount Sinai Hospital and later became Chief of Surgery at the Beth Israel Hospital in New York. Oppenheimer specialized in Urology and served as Chief of Urology at Mount Sinai.

Despite the appearance of shared collaboration in the authorship on the title page of the CGO paper, controversy exists over the significance of each of the individual's contribution to the publication. The significance of the paper itself is all that is truly important to medical progress; however, there exists a degree of drama that underlies the work and is of historical interest. The Mount Sinai Hospital Levy Library Archives holds copies of many correspondence, letters and speeches given by Crohn and Ginzburg regarding the origins of Crohn's disease at Mount Sinai. Within these letters and autobiographical articles, the original authors reflected on their lives some 50 years later to tell of the controversy beneath their discovery. Amongst these, Ginzburg and Crohn report a disparate sequence of events.

According to Ginzburg's account, the story begins with his interest in inflammatory granulomatous diseases in 1925 when he was on the surgical service of Dr. A.A. Berg (attending surgeon) and continued thereafter when he was an attending in his private practice. Dr. Berg had an extremely busy clinical practice and had operated on many cases of inflammatory masses of the intestines dating back to 1920. Ginzburg recruited Oppenheimer who was working in surgical pathology as an assistant, at that time, to help him begin his research. They collaborated to retrospectively review all the cases that involved surgical excision for an inflammatory mass of the large or small intestine. Using pathological analysis, they attempted to classify these cases, which amounted to 52 in total. Twelve of these patients disease had disease limited to the terminal ileum and did not fit any well-described pathological process. Dr. Ginzburg recalls that he and Dr. Oppenheimer referred to this group as "segmental, hypertrophic ulcerative stenosis of the terminal ileum." They attempted to study these cases more intensively, and owing to their limitations with more advanced pathologic evaluation, sought assistance from the Department of Pathology. It was this group of patients that, in collaboration with gastroenterology colleague Burrill B. Crohn, ultimately culminated in the Crohn, Ginzburg, Oppenheimer 1932 publication entitled "Regional ileitis: a pathologic and clinical entity" which included 14 cases (two added by Dr. Crohn). The larger group of 52 patients, put together by Ginzburg and Oppenheimer alone was published soon after in the Annals of Surgery 1933.