In professional literature pertaining to veterinary medicine very little has been published on surgery of the equine digestive tract. Many veterinarians are endowed with the belief that abdominal surgery in the equine patient is very rarely successful and that to attempt such would only seal the death warrant of the patient. Undoubtedly within recent years this belief has been many times disproven. The fact is, that major abdominal surgery can be performed with success in the Equidae and that this type of surgery is rapidly becoming more feasible than we were taught to believe 10 or 15 years ago. Probably some of the success can be attributed to improved aseptic and operative technics. However, one must admit that recent advances in chemo-therapy have played an important role. At any rate, chemotherapeusis is rather extensively employed, certainly not as a substitute for asepsis and good technic, but rather as an added safeguard in the prevention of peritonitis.