A disease characterized by the striking peculiarities of pneumonic fever must necessarily have attracted the attention of the disciples of our art from the very dawn of Medicine. That such was indeed the fact we know from the distinct allusions to it found in the most ancient of the writings of antiquity which have been handed down to us. It is true, however, that being comparatively ignorant of the relations existing between the clinical phenomena and the anatomical alterations of diseases, and of physical diagnosis, it was simply impossible for the physician of old to accurately differentiate the various acute diseases of the lungs, yet, inasmuch as the malady under consideration is the most common—excepting ordinary bronchial catarrh—most severe and most fatal—phthisis excepted—of these, we may infer, with much probability, that their words refer, for the greater part, to this affection.
Later, when it became the custom to occasionally continue