The monumental advances in the therapy of pneumococcal pneumonia over the past 15 years have given the physician a justified confidence that with modern antibiotics the outcome of a case of pneumonia will usually be favorable. Caution is needed lest we apply this confidence uncritically to every case and thereby relax in our efforts to discover uncommon but stubborn bacterial species which may infect the lung. Acute Friedländer's bacillus* pneumonia, though accounting for only a small percentage of such infections, still carries a sufficiently high mortality to make imperative its early recognition and the early institution of appropriate therapy.
The ocurrence of a number of fatal cases of acute Friedlander's bacillus pneumonia at the Cincinnati General Hospital during recent years, despite seemingly adequate antibiotic treatment, has prompted us to analyze our experience with this disease.
Material and Methods
Hospital records of all cases of pulmonary infection due to Klebsiella pneumoniae