Standard textbooks of pediatrics, with few exceptions,1 either fail to mention actinomycosis or consider it a rare condition in children.2 I recently saw three such cases and was able to find the records of several additional unpublished cases of the condition in children of 15 years or younger. It is with the idea of calling to the attention of pediatricians the clinical features of this disease that this paper is written.
Actinomycosis is a suppurative process combined with the formation of granulation tissues, the pus of which contains characteristic granules composed of dense aggregates of branched filamentous organisms and their products of transformation or degeneration.3
It was first known as a disease of cattle.4 Leblanc,5 in 1826, described a disease in the cattle of France, the most prominent symptom of which was a swelling of the jaw, which he termed osteosarcoma. In 1877, Bollinger6