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In Reply.—I appreciate Dr Fink's careful reading and thoughtful comments on my article, "High Fever." I agree with everything Dr Fink says in his first paragraph (except for the phrase, "Dr Tomlinson has missed the point..."!), and I agree with his last paragraph as well. Most practicing pediatricians have spent hundreds or thousands of hours trying to correct the erroneous beliefs Dr Fink mentions.
In regard to Dr Fink's second paragraph, I did not mean to imply that high fever in the office or in the hospital is more significant than the same degree of fever in the home. But (I hope) its existence is more certain if a trained medical observer has read the thermometer.
The basis for the conclusion that high fevers "are more likely to be associated with pneumonia if they persist for 12 to 18 hours" is the comparison of the two groups of patients