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I have entitled my paper "Abscess of the Lung Relieved by Bronchoscopy" because I, like others, have been disappointed in the results of this treatment. Some patients whom I thought were cured were not. One patient who was cured of cough and who was free from symptoms later developed abscess of the brain and died. After a free interval of two years, another patient had a hemorrhage and an operation was necessary.
As to etiology, twenty of 103 cases that I have seen in the last two years and a half had no clear cause. It is sometimes difficult to find the cause: the patients say that they had had pneumonia or had been in poor health for a year or two and then began to cough up sputum. I have listed the causes in the table.
In this table the incidence of abscess of the lung following tonsillectomy does