Declining Severity of Rheumatic Fever

Abstract

THE present report concerns the nature and extent of the decline in severity of rheumatic fever in recent years and certain factors that may have been in part responsible. It is based upon the long-term studies of rheumatic fever at the House of the Good Samaritan in Boston dating back to 1921.1 These studies, organized by the late Dr. T. Duckett Jones, have been carried on by him and his associates in the intervening years. They not only include an early era when this disease outnumbered all others as a cause of death in childhood but also extend over the . . .