[3] It was first described by Scottish surgeon James Cantlie in 1887 when he noticed a difference in the amount of atrophy on both sides of this line of the liver while performing an autopsy.

[2] This opposed the more commonly accepted opinion that the umbilical fissure divided the liver.

[2] The portal vein was already known to divide near the porta hepatis, as described by Francis Glisson in Anatomia hepatis, but Cantlie was the first to propose that the liver could be functionally divided into separate, distinct left and right halves.

This was confirmed later in experiments done by Rous and Larimore in 1920[4] and by Schalm in 1956.

[5] Though this discovery was made in 1897, the first clinical portal vein occlusions did not occur until 1982.