During the last decade, striking advances have been made in the diagnosis of diseases of the gallbladder. This has been due to recent additions to our knowledge of the function of the gallbladder by physiologists and the advent of two clinical diagnostic procedures; namely, nonsurgical bile drainage by Lyon and cholecystography by Graham and his associates. The purpose of this contribution is to relate our experience with these two diagnostic methods in gallstone disease. Cholecystography has achieved, justifiably, a place of importance in gallstone diagnosis. Biliary drainage, on the contrary, has not been generally adopted as a routine procedure in the study of suspected cases of cholelithiasis. In a previous communication, two of us1pointed out the importance of finding cholesterol crystals and so-called bilirubin calcium pigment in the bile preoperatively in the diagnosis of gallstone disease. Previous to this Hollander2and Mateer and Henderson3reported finding