TREATMENT OF LOBAR PNEUMONIA IN CHILDREN BY ARTIFICIAL PNEUMOTHORAX

This communication reports a study of the treatment of lobar pneumonia with artificial pneumothorax in twenty-two children, without fatality. It is obvious that any such clinical study is difficult to evaluate and that no final conclusions can be drawn from relatively few cases.

The literature on this form of therapy in children under 16 years of age is summarized in table 1. Only forty of the fifty-one cases reported in the literature may be classified as instances of lobar pneumonia, and among these were several in which the condition was of long duration and was complicated by interlobar effusions (Ibrahim and Duken,¹ and Jahr and Neuman²). The patients with bronchopneumonia showed pathologic changes that were chiefly unilateral. Certain differences between the condition in the group reported in the literature and that in our cases are noteworthy. Only 31 per cent of the patients in the former group were