The syndrome of rheumatic fever, with its major manifestations of polyarthritis, heart disease and chorea, is becoming increasingly important from the standpoint of public health.1 Yet with the causation, diagnosis and treatment still poorly defined, compared for example with those of a disease such as syphilis, a wholly satisfactory method of coping with this infection remains to be found.
One approach to a better understanding of the nature of rheumatic infections has been provided by an analysis of hospital admissions for this disease. The most comprehensive recent reports of this sort have dealt with Philadelphia,2 and New Haven,3 where the records of all hospitals were examined. Studies covering an entire city have been infrequent because of the difficulties involved in reviewing the records of a large number of hospitals. One of the values of such a study is that it provides a basis for estimating the number