_The time of aspiration of a foreign body_ may be unknown, having possibly occurred in infancy, during narcosis, or the object may even enter the lower air passages without the patient being aware of the accident, as happened with a particularly intelligent business man who unknowingly aspirated the tip of an atomizer while spraying his throat. In many other cases the accident had been forgotten. In still others, in spite of the patient's statement of a conviction that the trouble was due to a foreign body he had aspirated, the physician did not consider it worthy of sufficient consideration to warrant a roentgenray examination. It is curious to note the various opinions held in regard to the gravity of the presence of a bronchial foreign body. One patient was told by his physician that the presence of a staple in his bronchus was an impossibility, for he would not have lived five minutes after the accident. Others consider the presence of a foreign body in the bronchus as comparatively harmless, in spite of the repeated reports of invalidism and fatality in the medical literature of centuries. The older authorities state that all cases of prolonged bronchial foreign body sojourn died from phthisis pulmonalis, and it is still the opinion of some practitioners that the presence of a foreign body in the lung predisposes to the development of true tuberculosis. With the dissemination of knowledge regarding the possibility of bronchial foreign body, and the marvellous success in their removal by bronchoscopy, the cases of prolonged foreign body sojourn should decrease in number. It should be the recognized rule, and not the exception, that all chest conditions, acute or chronic, should have the benefit of roentgenographic study, even apart from the possibility of foreign body. Often even with the clear history of foreign-body aspiration, both patient and physician are deluded by a relatively long period of quiescence in which no symptoms are apparent. This symptomless interval is followed sooner or later by ever increasing cough and expectoration of sputum, finally by bronchiectasis and pulmonary abscess, chronic sepsis, and invalidism.