According to the historical review by Newman,1 the first report of gonococcic infection involving the heart was published by Ricord, in 1838, and the first investigator to recover gonococci from the blood stream was Rothmund, in 1889. Hewes,2 in 1894, cultured gonococci from the blood of 2 patients with gonococcic arthritis. Thayer and Blumer,3 in 1895, recovered the organism from the blood of a patient with endocarditis. Since the establishment of endocarditis as a definite complication of gonorrhea, over a hundred papers have appeared on this subject. Most of these have been reports of individual cases. Thayer,4 in 1922, reported 20 cases in which necropsy was performed at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and reviewed the reports of 60 cases previously described. More recently reviews have been published by Stone,5 Newman, McCants,6 Kirkland,7 Hoffman and Taggart8 and Solomon and his associates.9 Estimates of the number of acceptable