Independent Lung Anaesthesia in Severely Wet Lung Cases.

Because of the new antibiotics, the number of patients with copious amounts of secretions has diminished. Among our chest cases, however, the number of severely wet lung cases who come to operation is by no means low (El-Heneidy and Ashba, 1963). This is mainly due to the chronicity of these cases and the resistance of pre-operative infection to treatment. The result is that these patients, mainly suffering from bronchiectasis and lung abscess, still produce and retain excessive amounts of secretions. In some of these cases, secretions could not be controlled by any known method, and in a few instances we were compelled to abandon the operation. Therefore, we devised a method by which the severely wet lung was completely isolated from the sound lung.