The History of Surgery for Emphysema

Abstract

The first accounts of pulmonary emphysema can be found in Sir John Floyer’s A Treatise of the Asthma (1698) (1). In a description of an autopsy of a “broken winded” horse, Floyer vividly outlined the hyperinflation and airway obstruction that characterizes chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Dr. Matthew Baillie is credited with the first anatomic description and illustration of pulmonary emphysema (2,3). In The Morbid Anatomy of the Human Body, Baillie noted during a postmortem examination that “in opening into the chest it is not unusual to find that the lungs do not collapse but that they fill up the cavity completely on each side of the heart. When examined, their cells appear full of air so that there is seen upon the surface a prodigious number of small white vesicles.” The autopsy description and accompanying illustration (see Fig. 1) are of the lungs of Dr. Samuel Johnson (4).