PERIPHERAL vascular disease in the young child is rare. Most case reports feature gangrene of the limbs in neonates, ascribed to a variety of causes. An instance is described by Brown and Smith1 where gangrene of the hand in a newborn infant was found to be due to thrombosis of the subclavian artery in the absence of congenital heart disease. Stadler2 records an unusual case of neonatal symmetrical gangrene of the feet, with ultimate complete recession. The femoral, popliteal, and dorsalis pedis arteries were apparently normally palpable, but the author considered a congenital lesion as a possible cause.
Stokes and Shumacker3 review sudden gangrene in infants and report four cases of their own, only one of which was a neonate. It was their observation that the condition occurred in chronically ill, often dehydrated, children. One of their cases had undergone a period of hypotension; in another, femoral