A ten years' study of spontaneous pneumothorax in a community.

Most accounts of pneumothorax have been given from large hospitals drawing selected patients from a wide area or specializing in diseases of the chest. But the incidence of pneumothorax in a community and particularly the aetiological factors concerned in an unselected series have not been investigated. In this paper every known case of pneumothorax coming under observation at the Bedford General Hospital and its attached chest clinic during a 10-year period has been collected. These cases may be divided for convenience into three main groups, "idiopathic" spontaneous pneumothorax, spontaneous pneumothorax complicating pulmonary tuberculosis, and pneumothorax complicating pyogenic infection usually of the lung.