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BRIEF HISTORY OF GENERAL THORACIC SURGERY Chest surgery has come a long way from a single costal extraction to populate the earth to a procedure that resembles a video game. Thoracic surgery has been known since ancient times, however it was not until the past century that general thoracic surgery has become a separate surgical subspecialty. As this field of surgery has evolved, so has our knowledge of diseases we treat inside the chest. 1 At the beginning of the 20th century, the field of general surgery began expanding in response to the need for expertise in different areas of surgery. During the first half of the 20th century tuberculosis was the pathology most significant to the general thoracic surgeon. With this epidemic, along with World War I-related chest injuries, a special need for surgeons knowledgeable in thoracic diseases arose. Because of this need, general surgeons would begin dedicating their practice to thoracic pathologies. 2,3 In 1909 Jacobaeus performed his famous thoracoscopy, this first important period in thoracic surgery was known as the era of enthusiasm. By 1914 tuberculosis was a worldwide pandemic and for some time it became the number one cause of death in Colombia. War and tuberculosis were the 2 main factors pivoting general thoracic from general surgery, although it was not foreign war but domestic armed conflict that required the Colombian general surgeon to start focusing on chest injuries. In 1914, Dr Pompilio Mart ınez performed the country's first cardiac suture because of a penetrating chest injury in Bogota. To answer to this new era of thoracic warfare injuries and tuberculosis, the American Association for Thoracic Surgery was created in 1917. 4-6 It is worth mentioning that the first surgery ever filmed was a general thoracic procedure by Dr Alejandro Posada in 1899 in Argentina. Because cardiovascular disease was not a major issue at this time, the need for 2 separate thoracic subspecialties was not necessary, and thus North America and Europe