Diseases of the skin Author:Malcolm Morris Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 21 CHAPTER II. CLASSIFICATION. Classification is a good servant but a bad master, and the student must never allow himself to be beguiled into thinking ... more »that any system of pigeon-holing is an Ariadne's thread which will guide him safely through all the mazes of the pathology of the skin. There can be no finality in the classification of cutaneous affections till finality of knowledge of their causation, clinical phenomena, and pathological affinities has been reached. At present all attempts at classification must be provisional, shifting with the prevailing currents of scientific thought and liable to give way at any moment under the pressure of increasing knowledge. In these circumstances the best classification is not the most complete and most symmetrical, but that most likely to be practically useful for purposes of treatment, by grouping diseases according to their proved or probable etiological affinities. The earliest attempt to classify diseases of the skin was made by Hieronymus Mercurialis in the first book on dermatology ever published. His classification was purely regional, skin affections being divided into those of the head and those of other parts. This simple arrangement was followed nearly two centuries later by Daniel Turner,')' and afterwards by Alibert (1806), who made two principal genera of " De Morbis Cutaneis," 1572. t " A Treatise of Diseases Incident to the Skin," 1712. cutaneous diseases, those of the head (which he called teignes), and those of the body (which he called dartres). The former he subdivided into five, the latter into seven species, each with several varieties based on differences in the appearance of the lesion. Thus a scaly eruption on the trunk was a dartre squameuse, one with crusts a dartre crustacee, each being ...« less