The diagnosis and the precise localization of an abscess of the brain offer few difficulties in the typical case. The difficulties are, of course, more numerous in the atypical instance, but even there the diagnostic obstacles are not insurmountable. However, even when an abscess is diagnosed and localized, there arises the problem of devising a satisfactory method of therapeutic approach. The old axiom to evacuate pus wherever found, of course, holds also for an abscess of the brain, but attempts to carry out this measure are not frequently rewarded with success. The number of cured abscesses of the brain is still too small except for the isolated instances of satisfactory results in the hands of a few surgeons. Is this not due to the lack of a uniform and scientifically well grounded surgical procedure? It is true that several attempts have been made to depart from the time-worn, inadequate method of blindly searching for the abscess and the more or less crude means of evacuating and draining it. We have King's1 method and, more recently, the method of Dandy,2 but neither procedure has been sufficiently tested to warrant acceptance as the standard means of approach in the surgical treatment of abscess of the brain. The question arises whether a uniform surgical approach has not been evolved
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