William Osler was of two minds about pneumonia in the elderly. In the first of fourteen editions of The Principles and Practice of Medicine, he called it “the special enemy of old age,” but elsewhere he stated something quite different: “Pneumonia may well be called the friend of the aged. Taken off by it in an acute, short, not often painful illness, the old escape those ‘cold gradations of decay’ that make the last stage of all so distressing.”
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