All the foregoing cases were linear ruptures, but there is a unique case given by Boerhaave in 1724, in which the rent was transverse.

Ziemssen and Mackenzie have both translated from the Latin the report of this case which is briefly as follows: The patient, Baron de Wassenaer, was fifty years of age, and, with the exception that he had a sense of fulness after taking moderate meals, he was in perfect health.

To relieve this disagreeable feeling he was in the habit of taking a copious draught of an infusion of "blessed thistle" and ipecacuanha.

One day, about 10.30 in the evening, when he had taken no supper, but had eaten a rather hearty dinner, he was bothered by a peculiar sensation in his stomach, and to relieve this he swallowed about three tumbler-fuls of his usual infusion, but to no avail.

He then tried to excite vomiting by tickling the fauces, when, in retching, he suddenly felt a violent pain; he diagnosed his own case by saying that it was "the bursting of something near the pit of the stomach." He became prostrated and died in eighteen and one-half hours; at the necropsy it was seen that without any previously existing signs of disease the esophagus had been completely rent across in a transverse direction.
Schmidtmuller mentions separation of the esophagus from the stomach; and Flint reports the history of a boy of seven who died after being treated for worms and cerebral symptoms.