In 2002, Barry Marshall — the cowinner with Robin Warren of this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of Helicobacter pylori — edited a book entitled Helicobacter Pioneers.1 In it, he collected papers by and about the many physicians who had seen spiral bacteria in the stomach but whose work had languished or been erased from scientific memory. Indeed, the century preceding the publication of Marshall and Warren's first article on H. pylori was peppered with reports from investigators who described seeing helicobacters in human and mammalian gastric mucosa and even curing peptic ulcer disease . . .