THE PURPOSE of this paper is to emphasize the therapeutic value of corticotropin (ACTH) and cortisone in treatment of pemphigus vulgaris rather than to render a critical analysis of the study of patients with this disease, since the literature contains many excellent articles on the subject, including those by Gellis and Glass,1 Lever and Talbott,2 and Combes and Canizares.3
Treatment of pemphigus vulgaris has generally kept pace with new developments in therapeutics. Before the introduction of corticotropin and cortisone, various authors reported encouraging results with aureomycin,4 while Magner and associates5 reported favorable results with heparin sodium (depo-heparin®). Recent reports indicate that there may be a place for corticotropin and cortisone in the therapeutic armamentarium for this unusual and generally fatal disease. Cannon and associates6 reported seven patients with pemphigus treated with corticotropin and/or cortisone. Two of them died; the other