The Treatment of Pneumonia in Children

Abstract

LOBAR PNEUMONIA (croupous or fibrinous pneumonia), more often occurring in the older child, is an acute infectious disease caused usually by the pneumococcus, and characterized by a massive inflammatory exudate in one or more lobes of the lungs. The disease, the onset of which is usually sudden, induces chill, fever, cough, frequently dyspnea, and certain other physical symptoms corresponding to the group to which the particular form may be delegated. Of the immunologically different types of pneumococcus pneumonia, all may occur in children; Type IV infections are most common in infants, with Type III occurring rarely, and Type I appearing most frequently in older children. Bronchopneumonia (lobular pneumonia, capillary bronchitis), unlike lobar pneumonia, develops as a result of complex and diversified etiological factors. Significant is the relationship of high incidence in infants to the secondary nature of the disease, which finds among its predisposing factors the contagious infections of childhood such as measles, whooping cough, diphtheria, and so forth. Bronchopneumonia has no specific bacterial etiology, although the Bacillus in-