THEHOUSE OF THE GOOD SAMARITAN, now a division of the Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston, was one of the first institutions in the US to specialize in the problem of rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease ( RHD). Patients with these conditions were accepted for care almost from the time the hospital opened its doors in 1861. By 1921 several wards were devoted entirely to patients with rheumatic fever, chorea, and rheumatic heart disease and in 1931 the entire hospital was given over to the treatment and study of rheumatic fever and related diseases. Buried in the records of the hospital is a vast store of clinical information. Some of it has already been used, but much remains to be analyzed and evaluated. In order to utilize the available material as effectively as possible, we began to apply to this problem some of the newer data processing methods and