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Excerpt from The American Journal of the Medical Sciences, 1861, Vol. 41 The propriety of at least two subdivisions is obvious. Cases of Simple pneumonia are to be separated from the cases in which this disease is com plicated with other serious affections. With respect to some points of inquiry, these two classes of cases are to be interrogated separately. It is plain, that a collection of cases, in which the disease is uncomplicated, can alone furnish the data for determining the natural history of the disease, its intrinsic tendencies, the principles of treatment which belong to it per se, etc. An analysis of a collection, in which complicated and uncomplicated cases were mingled together, would furnish results leading to erroneous prae tical conclusions. The propriety of studying fatal and non-fatal cases separately, and making comparisons with regard to certain points, is appa rent. This will be the ground of another subdivision. The points of inquiry, to which attention will be first directed, relate to age, sex, occupation, habits, other Circumstances connected with the causa tion of the disease, and the comparative frequency of the disease in the different situations in which the cases were observed. Analysis with reference to Age, Sex, Occupation, Habits, Causation, and the comparative frequency of Cases of the Disease, in New Orleans, Louisville, and Bufalo. Age - The ages were noted in 121 cases. In three cases, the ages were under 10 and over 5 years. Two of these three cases were in private prac tice. Few patients were received into hospital under the age of ten years, and as all but twenty were hospital cases, it is evident, that in this collection, the proportion of cases in which the disease occurs under ten years of age is not fairly represented. The same remark is measurably applicable to the cases in which the ages were between 10 and 20 years. The proportion of hospital patients, between these ages, is much less than of those over 20 so that the liability to the disease, during that period of life, is not fairly represented by the number of patients over 10 and under 20, in this collection. The number is 13. The number of cases in which the ages were between 20 and 30 years is the largest, viz. 44. The number between the ages of 30 and 40 years is 37. The number between 40 and 50 years, 17; and between 50 and 60 years, 7. There was not a single instance of a patient over 60. Making due allowance for the periods of life, in which persons are most likely to resort to hospitals, and to the relative number of living persons of different ages, the inference to be drawn from. These statistics, as to the existence of a predisposition to pneumonia, peculiar to any of the foregoing decades, is negative. The liability to the disease, in childhood, adolescence, early manhood, middle life, and old age, is probably not very far from uniform at all events, the number of cases occurring at different ages is sufficient to show, that no period of life is exempt from it. The comparatively small number of persons over 60 living, and the few persons, so old as this, received into hospitals, will account for there being no patients over that age. The statistics of others Show that pneumonia occurs after I do not embrace in my collection cases under five years of age. This is not because I have not the records of such cases. Lobar pneumonia occurs in infancy, as well as the so-called lobular pneumonia; the propriety of considering the latter as a variety of pneumonia having been rendered more than doubtful by late researches, I have excluded cases in which the ages were under five years, in order to avoid discussion of a mooted question in pathology. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com