ABSTRACT
For centuries the pleura as an anatomical entity was either ignored or confused with the thoracic wall.1
In ancient Greek, “pleuron” meant ank or side and was used generically in other elds such as mythology, zoology, geometry, and architecture: Pleuron was an important gure in Greek mythology (the brother of Calydon and son of Aetolus); in zoology, pleuron is the lateral part of the thorax of an insect; in Plato’s Timaeus (c. 360 bc) the side of a triangle is called a pleuron (Timaeus, 53c); in architecture, a pleuron was a triangular opening in a partition wall of a cistern. ere was also the city of Pleuron in Aetolia, cited by Homer in the Iliad (Book II, 639) and by Ovid in Metamorphoses (Book VII, 382), so called perhaps because it was built on the side of a hill.
