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Thymic Cysts

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Surgery of the Thymus

Abstract

Although cysts of thymic origin are rare, their recognition dates back to the early nineteenth century. In 1832, at necropsy of two young syphilitic men, Lieutaud found suppurative changes in the thymuses, and related them to the concomitant necropsy finding of caseous pulmonary tuberculosis (Lieutaud 1832, cited by Dubois 1850). Dubois, in 1850, attributed cystic changes in the thymuses of three newborn infants who died from congenital syphilis to syphilitic suppuration and suggested that this, not tuberculous suppuration, had been the lesion in Lieutaud’s patients. Cystic changes in the thymus were described subsequently by Chiari (1894), Pollosson and Piéry (1901), Erdheim (1904), Hammar (1905), Pappenheimer (1910) and Klose (1914). All of those early studies were made on necropsy material and the cysts were either ascribed to syphilis or regarded as being of congenital origin. The thymuses were generally multicystic, with individual cysts varying from a few millimetres in diameter to “almost walnut size”.

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Authors
  1. Anthony S. Y. Leong
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois, 1011, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Jean-Claude Givel

  2. Service de Chirurgie A, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois, 1011, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Marco Merlini  & Michael Dusmet  & 

  3. Queen Elizabeth Medical Centre, The Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TH, UK

    David B. Clarke MB FRCS

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© 1990 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Leong, A.S.Y. (1990). Thymic Cysts. In: Givel, JC., Merlini, M., Clarke, D.B., Dusmet, M. (eds) Surgery of the Thymus. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-71076-6_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-71076-6_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-71078-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-71076-6

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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