CHAPTER VIII. 

 PNEUMONIA. 



THE term "pneumonia," while generally understood 

 to refer to the lobar disease particularly designated as 

 croupous pneumonia, is a vague one, really comprehend- 

 ing a variety of conditions quite dissimilar in character. 

 This being true, no one will be surprised to find that a 

 single organism cannot be described as "specific" for 

 them all. Indeed, pneumonia must be considered as a 

 group of diseases, and the various microbes found asso- 

 ciated with it must be described successively in connection 

 with the peculiar phase of the disease in which they occur. 



i. Lobar or Croupous Pneumonia. The bacterium, 

 which can be demonstrated in at least 75 per cent, of the 

 cases of lobar pneumonia, which is now almost uni- 

 versally accepted as the cause of the disease, and about 

 whose specificity very few doubts can be raised, is the 

 pneumococcus of Frankel and Weichselbaum. 



Priority of discovery in the case of the pneumococcus 

 seems to be in favor of Sternberg, who as early as 1880 de- 

 scribed an identical organism which he secured from his 

 saliva. Curiously enough, Pasteur seems to have cap- 

 tured the same organism, also from saliva, in the same 

 year. The researches of the observers whose names are 

 attached to the organism were not completed until five 

 years later. It is to Frankel, Telamon, and particularly 

 to Weichselbaum, however, that we are indebted for the 

 discovery of the relation which the organism bears to 

 pneumonia. 



The pneumococcus should rather be called the pneumo- 

 bacillus, for it habitually has an elongated form, and in 

 its most typical form is so distinctly elongate as to be 



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