ABSTRACT
Bronchiectasis is a chronic suppurative lung disease that can be localized or diffuse in nature. It is characterized by dilation of the airways due to a chronic inflammatory process. This process is caused by inadequate removal or clearance of microbes that are present from either an acute or a chronic infection. This disease was first described by Rene Laennec in 1819. He is said to have discovered this disease through auscultation and described the condition through the use of case reports. At that time, he identified that any illness characterized by chronic sputum production could lead to bronchiectasis. He identified tuberculosis and pertussis infection as the most likely causative conditions.1 Later in the nineteenth century, the disease was further studied by Sir WilliamOsler, who is said to have died from complications of bronchiectasis. In the early twentieth century, Dr. Jex-Blake, in a lecture given in a London Hospital for Consumption, explored hospital records over the preceding 20 years of admissions, postulating that bronchiectasis was a resultant condition of a preceding primary lung disorder. This assumption was formulated in the pre antibiotic era, when those patients were felt to have bronchiectasis secondary to pneumonia, pleurisy, or malignant tumors.2
