BRONCHOLITHIASIS: REPORT OF TEN CASES*

BRONCHOLITHS have been recognized in medical literature for centuries.1 In our time, with the impetus medical diagnosis has been given by improved technic in bronchology, roentgenology and biochemical analysis, this entity has changed its disposition from that of a medical curiosity to one of an accurately conceived disease. Because of the relative infrequency with which this disease occurs, broncholithiasis has often been neglected in the differential diagnosis of bronchial obstruction. As a result patients have found themselves erroneously classified among the more common diseases causing bronchial obstruction, thereby losing the advantage of an early diagnosis. By such delay not only are complications which might have been avoided or minimized given time to develop, but the patient is at times sub-mitted to unnecessary serious surgical procedures such as lobectomy or pneu-monectomy when the true etiology is not discovered. In presenting the following cases treated in the Department of Broncho-Esophagology of the Jefferson Hospital we would like to emphasize certain of the clinica