From 1838, there is an account by Hare in which the typical symptoms of a Pancoast tumor are described for the first time (Büttner 2004).
In 1932, radiologist Henry Pancoast presented a tumor in the superior pulmonary sulcus to the American Medical Association, which would later be named after him (Harvey 2012).
The Pancoast tumor was considered inoperable until the 1950s. It was not until 1953 that Chardack and MacCallum successfully resected a Pancoast tumor for the first time. In 1961, Shaw and Paulsen were the first to perform preoperative radiotherapy followed by resection (Ewig 2014).