HISTOPLASMOSIS OF DARLING

Abstract

Histoplasmosis of Darling (Darling's disease) is a rare disease entity. As far as can be ascertained, until 1934 only seven cases¹ had been reported in the medical literature, all of which had occurred in the Western hemisphere. Four were found in the tropics: three in Panama and one, in which the diagnosis was histoplasmosis of the lung,² in Honduras. The remaining three were reported from Minnesota, California and Tennessee, respectively. The racial distribution was varied. Of the four patients in the tropics, two were Martinique Negroes, one a Chinese and the fourth a "native" of Honduras. The patients in the United States were a mulatto and two members of the white race, one of them an infant, none of whom had ever been in the tropics or had had any contact with tropical areas. Only in the case reported by Dodd and Tompkins was the diagnosis made during