CLINICAL ASPECTS OF PRIMARY ATYPICAL PNEUMONIA: A STUDY BASED ON 1,862 CASES SEEN AT STATION HOSPITAL, JEFFERSON BARRACKS, MISSOURI, FROM JUNE 1, 1942 TO AUG. 10, 1943

The increasing incidence of primary atypical pneumonia in certain army hospitals in combination with its frequently prolonged febrile period and slow convalescence is rapidly making it one of the most important causes of man days lost from duty in the military service. The appearance of this disease in significant numbers of cases at the time the medical literature was heralding the conquest of pneumococcic pneumonia is but another indication that medicine will never become a static science. Recent reports by a commission representing the Surgeon General (Dingle, Abernathy and others 1 ), Dingle and Finland, 2 Reimann, 3 Seeds and Mazer, 4 Campbell and his collaborators 5 and MacLeod 6 have thoroughly reviewed the present state of knowledge regarding causation, clinical aspects, epidemiology, x-ray appearance and treatment. It has been shown that primary atypical pneumonia, as the name suggests, is a heterologous group of diverse causation. Occasional cases and groups of