CHARACTERIZATION OF VARIOUS FORMS OF ENDOCARDITIS

Abstract

According to the studies that we have made, cases of endocarditis can for the present be best classed as rheumatic, syphilitic, acute bacterial, subacute bacterial, and indeterminate. The cause of rheumatic fever has not yet been discovered. There exists, however, a lesion specific for the disease, the Aschoff body. It is to be remembered that this is a perivascular lesion, in contradistinction to the lesion later to be noted as occurring in cases of subacute bacterial endocarditis. In rheumatic fever, a secondary infection by anhemolytic streptococci was found by Kinsella and Swift in 8.3 per cent, of the cases studied by them. At the postmortem examinations, cultures yielded the organisms in 50 per cent, of the cases. They found no immunologic reactions present for these cocci, whereas in cases of subacute streptococcus endocarditis they observed, as we did, that a complement fixation test is uniformly present when the serum of