History
An early description of traumatic pneumothorax secondary to rib fractures appears in Imperial Surgery by Turkish surgeon Şerafeddin Sabuncuoğlu (1385–1468), which also recommends a method of simple aspiration.
Pneumothorax was described in 1803 by Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, a student of René Laennec, who provided an extensive description of the clinical picture in 1819. While Itard and Laennec recognized that some cases were not due to tuberculosis (then the most common cause), the concept of primary spontaneous pneumothorax was reintroduced by the Danish physician Hans Kjærgaard in 1932. In 1941, the surgeons Tyson and Crandall introduced pleural abrasion for the treatment of pneumothorax.
Prior to the advent of anti-tuberculous medications, iatrogenic pneumothoraces were intentionally given to people with tuberculosis in an effort to collapse a lobe, or entire lung, around a cavitating lesion. This was known as "resting the lung". It was introduced by the Italian surgeon Carlo Forlanini in 1888, and publicized by the American surgeon John Benjamin Murphy in the early 20th century (after discovering the same procedure independently). Murphy used the (then) recently discovered X-ray technology to create pneumothoraces of the correct size.
Read more about this topic: Pneumothorax
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