From the surgical standpoint carcinoma of the lung has presented so many difficulties that of all organs of the body attacked by this disease it has been the last to give way to surgical intervention. The reported cases of operation are as yet small and the results not too heartening.
The difficulties encountered have to do not only with the surgical problems involved, but equally with the peculiar and vicious characteristics of the disease and the difficulty in diagnosis while in the operable stage, owing to the wide variations in its clinical phenomena. On the one hand, we have a disease so fulminating and rapid in its course that death comes in a few weeks. Again metastases have widely taken place before the lung phenomena have expressed themselves in diagnosable form. On the other hand, its course may be so insidious and symptomless that the patient seeks medical advice only