Whooping Cough — Viral or Bacterial Disease?

In some despair Robert Watt wrote in 1813 that whooping cough “…has been very generally abandoned by the profession and left to the management of old women and quacks”.¹ The dwindling interest in the disease among physicians in the past generation lends some currency to this statement, although we should prefer to label the coterie of persistent pertussis investigators something other than quacks. It is, therefore, refreshing to see interest in this classic disease revivified by Connor's article in this issue of the Journal. Before Bordet and Gengou the small bacilli abundant in nasopharyngeal mucus and sputum from patients.