Imaging taken early last Autumn in the hospital I worked in revealed startling images. Multiple round ring shadows, overlapping against each other, were clearly visible in the apices of both lung fields in the chest radiograph of a patient who had just been newly admitted. The junior doctors involved in the immediate care of the patient requested an urgent report on the X-ray, which confirmed that the patient had been the recipient of ‘plombage’, a form of surgical therapy used for the treatment of tuberculosis (TB) before the 1950s and prior to the use of antituberculosis drugs; the opacities in this case being ping pong balls.
展开▼
