The term "spontaneous circumrenal haematoma" is self- explanatory and excludes, by definition, cases of traumatic origin. The condifion is said to be a rare one, though I have had to deal with two cases in the past nine years. These two cases and a short review of the subject are thought to be worth publishing, as no mention is made of the condition in most of the standard surgical textbooks, and no description of it had appeared in any English journal until that of Heritage in 1934. The condition is referred to by Hamilton Bailey (1944) and in American papers under the title of spontaneous perirenal haematoma. At risk of seeming pedantic, however, the Graeco-Roman bastardy of the word " perirenal " should condemn it. The condition is probably not as rare as the literature would suggest; it may possibly be the underlying lesion in such labels as " retroperitoneal sarcoma " and " retroperitoneal haematoma of obscure aetiology."
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K. W. Martin (1949) studied this question.