Penicillin Treatment of Infectious Mononucleosis

DURING recent years, infectious mononucleosis has become increasingly prominent among the acute infections of the throat, probably primarily because of more frequent recognition of the disease, but perhaps also because of its increasing frequency.¹This development naturally gives rise to the question of effective therapy, but, unfortunately, this does not yet appear to have been found. Since definite knowledge of the causation of the disease is still not available one must depend on empirical results in the field of therapy; therefore, it may be of interest to see how the disease is influenced by the new antibiotics. The literature contains only scanty information on the subject, and this is often based on single cases or on very few observations. In regard to the effect of penicillin, opinions differ.²In those cases in which some improvement was thought to have occurred,³it seemed chiefly directed toward the accompanying