13 Now in the neck between the skin and the trachea, a tumour occurs which the Greeks call bronchocele, it contains now soft flesh, now a humour[p. 377] somewhat like honey or water, sometimes also hairs mixed up with minute bones; whatever the contents, they are enclosed in a coat. Treatment is possible by caustics which eat away the skin together with the underlying tunic. When this has been done, if there is humour inside, it flows out; if anything solid, it is turned out with the finger; the wound then heals under lint dressings. But treatment by the knife is shorter. A linear incision is made over the middle of the tumour down to the tunic; then the morbid pouch is separated by the finger from the sound tissue, and the whole is removed along with its covering. Next the wound is washed out with vinegar to which either salt or soda has been added, and the margins brought together by one suture; the rest of the applications are the same as in other cases of sutured wounds and after that it is lightly bandaged so as not to trouble the throat by pressure. But if it is impossible to take out the tunic, caustics are to be dusted into its interior, and it is then dressed with lint and other suppuratives.
De Medicina. Celsus. W. G. Spencer. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard University Press. 1971 (Republication of the 1935 edition).
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