Acute nonspecific idiopathic pericarditis; report of a case treated with orally administered cortisone.

Abstract

Introduction THE LATE Dr. Henry A. Christian, 1 in a manuscript received for publication the day of his death, recalled that during his student days at John Hopkins Medical School in 1898 he read in Osler's Principles and Practices of Medicine, second edition, published in 1895, of idiopathic or primary periocarditis and that the term idiopathic pericarditis appeared in the title of many papers dating back to 1854 in the first series of the Index Catalog of the Surgeon General's Office, in Washington, D. C., in the volume published in 1889. In a lecture as Hersey Professor of the Theory and Practice of Physic at the Harvard Medical School in 1901 he said, Now as far as pericarditis is concerned, you can get a primary pericarditis, primary in the sense that you have no other inflammatory process in the body, you have no particular portal of entry that you can