In The Woman's Voice Clinic: Pneumonia

In The Woman's Voice Clinic

The death rate from pneumonia has fallen 75 percent in the last twenty years.

One day early this winter, a woman lay in one of New York's hospitals, inside an 'oxygen tent,' panting with a strange rapidity and tossing on the fire of a raging fever...

The doctors had drawn up their report on this woman, indicating that the illness was a form of acute pneumonia — but that the possibility of recovery was great, indeed certain!

The microbe that struck this woman down is of the kind that occurs mostly in the damp months of winter. Pneumonia is not one of those diseases that strike some people and spare others; but it appears that it calls more often on the people of crowded cities! It appears, too, that it strikes children and the aged more than it strikes the young, and that man has stronger immunity against it than woman!

It is agreed that heavy strain, exposure to cold, chest inflammations, and the taking of alcohol — all of these weaken immunity, or resistance, to pneumonia; but infection occurs, without fail, as the result of contamination by an active microbe...

Had this lady been stricken with pneumonia in 1930 instead of 1950, the report the doctors wrote of her condition would have been deeply pessimistic, and signed off with the word 'danger.' In that era a third of all cases of pneumonia ended in death, because medicine was not then armed against it with the sharp weapon we have today.

In the last twenty years, the treatment of pneumonia has taken three strides to arrive at the excellent result we speak of today. First: treatment with animal serum; second: treatment with sulfa; and third: penicillin — and this last treatment is beyond question better than the others, for the speed of its action and its distance from any danger.

In the case of this sick lady, penicillin halted the course of the disease in a single day and cured the patient in a single week. In other cases the action of penicillin may be swifter still.

And we thank God that penicillin, which not long ago was hard to obtain and dear in price, has today become cheap and within reach of every class of people; and thus the disease of pneumonia, which stood third among diseases in its danger to human life, has been utterly vanquished.