STAPHYLOCOCCIC INFECTION SIMULATING SCARLET FEVER

Abstract

Scarlet fever was identified by both Sennert and Sydenham as a separate clinical entity during the seventeenth century, but discussions of its etiology remained purely speculative until two centuries later. In 1869 Hallier¹isolated streptococci from the blood of several patients with scarlet fever, and in the eighties W. H. Power²and Klein³traced epidemics of the disease to milk obtained from cows with streptococcic mastitis. It is of considerable historical interest that the modern concept of the pathogenesis of scarlet fever was formulated as early as 1893. Thirty years before the classic experiments of the Dicks⁴and Dochez,⁵Bergé⁶had written: Scarlet fever is a local infection; the infectious agent which produces it is the streptococcus, in one of its virulent forms; in the common type of scarlet fever, which one might call pharyngeal, the streptococcus multiplies in the pharyngeal and tonsillar crypts