Simplification and Improvement in Estimating Drug Dosage and Fluid and Dietary Allowances for Patients of Varying Sizes

Abstract

FOR over a century clinicians have known that infant dosages expressed per kilogram are excessive for adults and that adult dosages per kilogram are inadequate for infants.The BackgroundRecognizing this lack of proportionality of dosage to body weight, Hufeland,¹ in 1830, proposed on the basis of clinical experience a scale of doses according to size, the doses expressed as percentage of adult dose being closely proportional to body-surface area. Moore,² in 1909, wrote as follows:It is an almost universal custom at the present time, in describing scientific work of a pharmacological or therapeutic nature intended either to establish . . .