It is now definitely recognized that disease of the lungs or of the heart may produce a considerable reduction in the vital capacity of the lungs. Due to the fact that the normal lung capacity, particularly for children, is not generally known, clinicians have experienced difficulty in estimating accurately the extent of the reduction in vital capacity existing in individual cases. As a result such determinations are rarely included in the routine examination of children suffering from alleged cardiac or pulmonary disease.
Rather extensive series of observations made on healthy children have been published especially by Gilbert,1 Smedley,2 Baldwin,3 Emerson and Green4 and Wilson and Edwards.5 Unfortunately, most of these data have appeared in journals not readily accessible to the medical profession. We wish to contribute vital capacity averages for 430 healthy children (228 boys, 202 girls), ranging in age from 4 to 15 years