Manual of diseases of the skin / from the French of Cazenave and Schedel ; with notes and additions by Thomas H. Burgess.

Date:
1842
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Manual of diseases of the skin / from the French of Cazenave and Schedel ; with notes and additions by Thomas H. Burgess. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    INTRODUCTION. There is no class of diseases which have been, and are still, so much neglected as diseases of the skin ; yet there are none so easily recognised, for their characteristic phenomena are appreci- able by the eye, while they are at the same time extremely fre- quent. Perhaps, however, these two circumstances may account for the confusion which has prevailed in the history of cutaneous af- fections; here, as in many other branches of medicine, the multitude of facts has merely served to encumber the science, without enrich- ing it; and what other results could we expect, when the different stages of the same affection have been described as diseases essen- tially different from each other, and the various facts on which the science rests have been collected without order or any view to classification. Want of classification in the first instance, and at a later period imperfect classifications, have greatly contributed to envelope in obscurity the history of cutaneous affections; still, between the end of the sixteenth to the commencement of the nine- teenth century, several writers have endeavoured to reduce the study of these diseases to some order, and, by grouping together the different forms, have succeeded in throwing much light on this important branch of pathology. The various classifications may be reduced to three. The first was introduced by Mercurialis, (De Morb. Cut. 1576,) adopted by Turner, (Tr. des Mai. de la Peau, 1743,) again brought forward in R