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The first member ofthe group ofpleuropneumonia organisms was isolated by Nocard and Roux in 1898 from cases of contagious pleuropneumonia of cattle, a disease in which the essential pathological lesions are gross pulmonary cedema, pleural exudate, and arthritis. A similar organism was found by Bridre andDonatien (1923, 1925) (Laidlaw and Elford, -1936), soil, and manure (Seifert, 1937).In recent years organisms of the group have been identified in the urogenital tracts of both men and women. Dienes and Edsall (1937) isolated from a Bartholin abscess of a laboratory worker a strain which was possibly human, but at the time the infection was considered to be due to the patient's contact with rats. However, Dienes (1940) was really the first to record the presence of pleuropneumonia-like organisms (indistinguishable initially from the strains isolated from rats and mice) in the cervical secretions of females, the majority of whom were suffering from pelvic infections. The organisms were demonstrated in a third of the cases examined-; in two cases they were associated with the gonococcus, and in one they persisted after the elimination of gonococci by sulphonamide therapy. Smith (1942) isolated six strains, five from the cervix and one from the urethral discharge of a male with non-gonococcal urethritis and arthritis. Dienes and Smith (1942) investigated 129 unselected cases and recovered pleuropneumonia-like organisms from twenty-three of seventy-seven cervical secretions, one of eight vaginal secretions, three of thirty-six prostatic secretions, and one of eight urethral discharges in males. All the four male cases in which cultures were positive were suffering from non-gonococcal prostatitis, two of these being complicated by acute polyarthritis and one by rheumatoid' arthritis; cultures of the synovial fluid in two yielded negative results. A cervicitis was present in twelve of the females with positive cultures (seven associated with the gonococcus), and four were complicated by arthritis. The husband of one of the latter cases. was also suffering from a non-gonococcal urethritis with polyarthritis, which the authors suggested was evidence of the transfer of the organism by sexual intercourse. Another case (not included in the above series), of a man with chronic prostatitis and tenosynovitis whose wife developed cervicitis and acute arthritis fourteen days after marriage (pleuropneumonia-like organisms being grown from the prostatic and cervical secretions), provided further evidence of transmission during sexual intercourse.

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