History of dermatology

The history of dermatology is the history of mankind. The history of dermatology can only be distinguished from the history of medicine at the beginning of the 19th century when dermatology like the other specialties began to be recognized as a specialities branch of medicine.

The invention of writings coincided with early cities in Africa. Early texts were mainly for administration or religious purposes, but medical writings soon appeared, Many of them related to skin disorders.

There was initial age of medicine dominated by magic, followed by the growth of rational medicine led by Hippocrates around 400 C. Hippocratic writings contained a number of passages which refer to cutaneous disorders. He divided skin disease into two types: local and constitutional. Local means those with an independent existence while constitutional means that those occur due to elimination of disease.

Aristotle (383-322 BC) too was aware of the hormonal association of baldness. He noticed that either normal women or eunuchs went bald and that both were unable to grow hair on their chest.

A group of brilliant doctors in Padua, including Vesalius and Mercurialis, set up a system of learning and wrote medical texts that revitalized medicine in Europe. Mercurialis wrote De Morbis Cuteneis in 1572: this summarized work of early writers and has focus on hair disorders, but still represents the first dermatology textbook in the west since the time of Paul of Aegina, 800 years before.

In 1817, Robert Willan produced images of skin diseases in his textbook, the first dermatology atlas that was completed by Bateman. This atlas went through many editions and was still in print in 1877.

At the beginning of the 20th century, dermatology was developing in most European and North American countries with fledging dermatology societies and dermatology journals.
History of dermatology