THRUSH INFECTIONS OF THE SKIN

Abstract

Among the innumerable fungus diseases of the skin, thrush infection is one of the most recent, the knowledge that this organism is capable of exciting cutaneous eruptions being in reality an acquisition of the past ten years. The causative agent in these eruptions, Oidium albicans, or thrush fungus, belongs to those first micro-organisms which were studied with the help of the microscope about eighty years ago; yet thrush infections of the mucous membranes, and especially oral thrush infection, have long been known. Until recent years, however, we have been prone to consider thrush infections as limited to the mouths of nursing infants or to the vagina of pregnant women—less frequently with localization on other mucous membranes, as in the nose, larynx, esophagus, bladder and urethra. These various lesions of the mucous membrane have, for the most part, been of benign character; yet, at times, this apparently harmless fungus has broken