HALLUCINOGENIC DRUGS

and in individual patients with primary atypical pneumonia, renders such studies invalid; second, the frequency of essentially spontaneous remissions in this disease. The results of the present study indicate that it is distinctly unusual for progression of a majority of the signs and symptoms of the disease to occur after the patient has been in hospital and that in one-third of untreated patients a considerable remission of fever will occur within forty-eight hours of admission to hospital. These data, Walker suggests, probably indicate the efficacy of bed rest in the treatment of this disease, but they clearly demonstrate, even more, how readily a therapeutic agent may be credited with specific efficacy in an uncontrolled study. Incidentally, Walker states that despite an initial impression that aureomycin was effective in a variety of presumably small-virus diseases, now the only clear evidence of its efficacy in virus infection is in the diseases of the psittacosis-lymphopathia venereum group. Neither this statement nor the study of primary atypical pneumonia reflects adversely in any way on its usefulness in the treatment of infections due to other types of organisms.