ABSTRACT
For centuries the pleura as an anatomical entity was either ignored or confused with the thoracic wall.1 In ancient Greek, pleuron meant flank or side and was used generically in other fields such as mythology, zoology, geometry and botany. Pleuron was an important figure 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. 360BC) the side of a triangle is called a pleuron (Timaeus, 53c). There 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.
