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COPYRIGHT 2003 International Medical News Group
The first prescription known, written in hieroglyphics in the Ebers papyrus, was for a skin problem. So the very first prescription preserved in history was written by someone who was practicing dermatology What was that prescription for? It was for a wrinkle cream, 6,000 years ago.
Treatises were written on skin diseases as early as 30 A,D., but the fathers of modern medical dermatology were Robert Willan (1757-1812) and, of course, in France, Jean-Louis-Marc Alibert (1768-1837). Other great physicians followed, describing the diseases that defined dermatology: syphilis, tuberculosis, leprosy, eczema, exanthems, lupus, scleroderma, dermatomyositis, and mycosis fungoides.
At the time of Willan and Alibert, there were no dermatologists. Everyone was a doctor. Doctors had areas of special interest--for example, the heart, lungs, or skin--but they all treated every patient who came to them. They called in a colleague for consultation, but did not refer patients to another doctor because he or she was a specialist in that area.
Of course, it was syphilis that really drove our specialty The incidence of the disease by the end of World War II approached 500 cases per 100,000 people per year. One of every 12 recruits in World War II had evidence of syphilis.
Dermatologists made their living treating it, as well as other common diseases that presented on the skin.
Following the model of Alibert, they viewed the skin as simply a mirror of what was happening in the body The skin was a way to see a disease the same way a general practitioner would use a stethoscope to listen to a patient's lungs or a nurse would take the patient's temperature, It was...
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