ABSTRACTS [This section of the ANNALS is published in collaboration with the two abstracting Journals, Abstracts of World Medicine, and Abstracts of World Surgery, Obstetrics and Gynaecology, published by the British Medical Association. The abstracts are divided into the following sections: acute rheumatism; chronic articular rheumatism (rheumatoid arthritis, osteo-arthritis, spondylitis, miscellaneous); sciatica; gout; non-articular rheumatism; general articles. After each subsection of

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... cts follows a list of articles that have been noted but not abstracted. Not all sections may be represented in any one issue.] Acute Rheumatism Experimental Studies of the Pathogenesis of Acute Rheumatism. (Experimentelle Studien uber die Pathogenese des fieberhaften Rheumatismus (Polyarthritis acuta rheumatica.) CAVELTI, P. A. (1948). Schweiz. med. Wschr., 78, 83. The previous literature on the experimental production of antigens in animals is briefly reviewed. The author describes his own experimental work, in which rats and rabbits were innoculated intraperitoneally with a mixture of fl-haemolytic streptococci and an extract of heart, connective tissue, or skeletal muscle of their own species. The streptococci, which were killed and belonged to the NY 5 strain, were serologically of Group A. Autoantibodies could be demonstrated in 45 to 85°/ of cases, the titre varying from 1 in 40 to 1 in 280. These were usually present after a week, approximately 10 injections having been given. Animals treated with streptococci or tissue extracts alone failed to show the formation of auto-antibodies. The rats were killed after 1 to 120 days and histological examination was carried out. There was evidence of both myocarditis and endocarditis, the valves of the left heart, especially the mitral, being the more frequently affected. The significance of these findings and found vessels in the fibro-elastic layer of one or more valvular cusps in all the rheumatic hearts and in 43 (21.5%) of the non-rheumatic hearts. A microscopical study of the affected cusps showed in all of them evident signs of an active or cicatrized inflammatory process, such as interstitial and perivascular exudative and productive phenomena, affecting both the fibro-elastic layer and the subjacent myocardium. The Aschoff-Geipel granuloma was found in 30% of rheumatic hearts and in 70 of non-rheumatic ones. Of the 157 cases not presenting valvular vascularization, rheumatic stigmata were found in the myocardium in 37 (24%). Thus the apparently non-rheumatic hearts of 80 (43 + 37) individuals out of 200, or 40%, show signs of active or healed rheumatic myocarditis, and 21-5% also present signs of endocarditis. The obvious conclusion is that the rheumatic affection is much more common than would appear from the clinical manifestations. A. Lilker.