What is the appropriate management of acute uncomplicated appendicitis in contemporary South Africa?

Acute appendicitis has afflicted humankind throughout our existence but has been a surgical disease for little over one hundred and fifty years. Leonardo da Vinci first drew the appendix in 1508, and several anatomists described it over the next two centuries. These included Berengarius in 1522, Andreas Vesalius in 1543 and Giovanni Battista Morgagni in 1719.¹ Several pathologists began to define and elucidate the pathophysiology of acute appendicitis and a number of authors from the enlightenment onwards began to describe what was termed typhlitis until Fitz, described a large series of acute appendicitis in 1886. The first recorded operation for acute appendicitis was by the expatriate French surgeon Amyand in London in 1753.