Recent studies of glomerular nephritis in childhood, among which may be mentioned those of Guild,1 Boyd,2 Aldrich,3 Blackfan,4 Levy5 and Lyttle and Rosenberg,6 disclose two tendencies of opinion with which our7 own observations do not permit us to concur. One of these is to regard the prognosis of acute glomerular nephritis in childhood, whether postscarlatinal or not, as almost uniformly good for complete recovery. The other is to regard such other manifestations of renal disease as nephrosis with glomerular episodes (Tappan8), chronic nonspecific nephritis (Aldrich9), subacute parenchymatous nephritis (Holt and McIntosh10) and chronic nephritis as entities etiologically unconnected with acute glomerular nephritis.
The idea that acute nephritis may in some instances lead by direct continuity to chronic forms of nephritis and eventually to death from renal failure, which was upheld in pediatric literature as early as 1897 by the elder