Congenital cystic disease of the lung.

CONGENITAL cystic disease of the lung is an uncommon, though not rare condition, seen on occasion at autopsy and, in the past two decades, with the progress of thoracic surgery, more frequently by the surgical pathologist. Incidence. Bartholinus' recorded the first case in 1687 and an excellent clinical description of the disease is given by Laennec.2 Fontanus described a case in the seventeenth century and Wood3 quotes Sir Thomas Barlow, who in 1889 recorded the discovery of "an air cyst, of-chestnut size, with a smooth lining and thin walls", in a child who died at three months of age. Koontz4 in 1925 gathered 108 cases from the European literature, of which he considered less than one hundred to be true congenital cysts. Schenck5 in 1937 collected a total of 381 cases, and Wood6 in the same year added 48, seen at the Mayo Clinic. Liese quoted by Wiese7 recorded some 400 cases in the same period. Extensive reviews, notably by Sellors8 Dickson et at.,9 and Adams et at.,'0 plus numerous reported cases, have brought the total to well over the six hundred mark. These probably only partially represent the number that have been actually studied, but are more than sufficient to establish the condition as an uncommon entity, rather than a medical curiosity. Analysis of the available cases reveals the sex incidence to be about equal: males predominate slightly in Schenk's1" original series.