1950s Pnuemonia treatment

[theunknown47]

I'd like to know how pneumonia was treated in the 1950s. I'm writing a story that takes place in West Germany in the 1950s(don't know exactly what year yet). My story features a character who had pneumonia before he fled East Germany to come to West Germany. He received treatment in East Germany, but wasn't deemed well enough to travel when he left

Comments

[lilacsigil]

It was treated with antibiotics and supportive care, pretty much the same as now.

[majolika]

[thekumquat]

Look up "antibiotics 1950s" - antibiotics were certainly available but not necessarily the same ones as used now. I think it might have been sulphonamides used then, but not sure.

Pneumonia treatment

[poein]

Antibiotics were discovered early in the 20th century, and by the mid-30s there were sulfonamides that acted against gram-positive cocci (the type of bacteria most often associated with pneumonia in adults). That type of antibiotic was common and cheap enough to be used in veterinary practice at that time, so almost any doctor in the industrialized world would have had access, and a patient with pneumonia in almost any Western country would probably have received them.

Other than that, supportive care--rest, fluids, etc. as needed.

[anonymous]

Agreed. And in 1950, all the Occupation Zones of Germany were still pretty much the same, in terms of living conditions. (And in 1950, both the governments would have still been rather provisionary and completely under the thumb of the occupying military forces. Remember that the uprising in East Germany in 1953 was ended by Russian tanks rolling through Berlin again.) The problem wouldn't have been the burgeoning socialism in the East, but general rationing (though the actual famine probably was over by then), possibly lack of manpower (look up when the German POWs were sent home - those were pretty much all that was left of the ablebodied male population that had been between 16 and 50 in 1945) and insufficient housing. (I've read that something like 80% of the housing in cities had been destroyed by bombing campaigns

[anonymous]

Argh, so many typos! Sorry - I do know better, it's just very late over here. And I was trying to reply to Majolika, hence the "Agreed" at the beginning.

[anonymous]

Hm... Actually, my mother's childhood tuberculosis may have been treate with streptomycin (invented in 1943 and according to Wikipedia the first antibiotic that really helped against tuberculosis). Either that, or my mother misremembers the source of her eye infection.

However, while the Wikipedia article on lung sanatoriums states that those were closed throughout the Western world in the 1950s due to now available antibiotic treatment of lung tuberulosis, I know for sure that my father still spent some time in one of them in the late 1950, possibly in addition to antibiotic treatment. (The sanatoriums had been aroumnd since the late 19th century and operated on the principle that with fresh air, good nourishment and lots of lying in the sun in a deckchair bundled up against the cold, the body would fight the disease off by itself. Which did work to a certain extent - the 19h ccentury clichée of the prostitute or starving artist dying of 'consumption' exists for a reason. Rich people often managed to recover.)

[anonymous]

(still the same person)
Okay, I'm insomniac and bored, so I tried looking it up in my father's old medical textbooks (printed in the early 1960s - that's the best I can do). But the one I found in a hurry listed like two dozen different disease (not all of them caused by bacteria) as possible reasons for "Pneumonie" (the word just means "infection oof the lung", after all). Even "bacterial pneumonia" can be caused by a host of different sppecies, which don't all respond to the same antibiotic. So I guess you're going to have to be more specific, if you want details for the treatment regime.