[Purulent meningitis in older children and adults (author's transl)].

Purulent meningitis is a clinical syndrome whose appearance is particularly influenced by heteropathogenesis and polyetiology in addition to a multitude of individual factors. Symptomatology and type only become comprehensible, diagnosis, therapy and prognosis only become reconciled when the individual pathogenetic connections have been grasped and taken into consideration. The fate of the by no means rare meningitic diseases is so closely related to the professional experience of the doctors treating the case that quite certainly their degree of experience must also be evaluated as a prognostic parameter.