MASSIVE ATELECTASIS AND POSTOPERATIVE PNEUMONIA: PROPHYLAXIS AND TREATMENT

Every physician and particularly every surgeon should be keenly interested in the prevention and treatment of postoperative pulmonary complications. Anesthesia, asepsis and accurate hemostasis have removed most of the dangers of surgical intervention and have vastly increased the limits of surgery, particularly for operations of election. Only in the control of the postoperative pulmonary complications has little progress been made, and in this field lie infrequent but still unpreventable postoperative tragedies. The study of massive atelectasis had interested me for a number of years in the surgical clinics of the Peter Bent Brigham and Lakeside hospitals.2Therefore when I went to the surgical clinic of the University of Rochester, on its establishment, it surprised me greatly to find that there seemed to be a diminished incidence of this complication, although I had the opportunity of studying several instances in other hospitals of the same city. Thus, the apparent diminution