It is usually assumed that lung hernia secondary to congenital absence of ribs is a great rarity. Perasalo and Laustela (1956) describing the latest published case, of a man aged 28 years, could not find any reference to this deformity in the literature and only one of the recently published books on paediatric surgery (Swenson, 1958) mentions the malformation. Perusal of the literature, howeve...