Extracranial Aneurysm of the Internal Carotid Artery

While extracranial aneurysm of the internal carotid artery is not a common condition, it is by no means as infrequent a lesion as hitherto supposed. In a paper in 1921, I was able to compile out of the literature sixty-nine cases, to which I added a personal observation.1At that time I thought I had exhausted the field, only to discover later, in a source unavailable then, a number of additional examples of this lesion. By adding these and some cases that have appeared in the more recent literature to my earlier compilation, the recorded instances of extracranial aneurysm of the internal carotid artery show the no insignificant total of 106 cases, divided as follows: spontaneous, forty-two; erosive, eighteen; traumatic, twenty-six; arteriovenous, nineteen, and unclassified, one.2But it is not so much the rarity of this lesion, when it does occur, that commands our attention as its propensity