Two hundred years of dermatology

Two hundred years ago the English physician Robert Willan published the first section of his masterwork, On cutaneous diseases. In it he described and demonstrated a new way of examining cutaneous eruptions that enabled physicians dealing with skin diseases to impose, for the first time, a significant degree of order on a field in which disorder had been the rule. The utility and successful application of the new approach soon attracted the attention of a talented cadre of physicians who embraced the study of the skin and its problems with enthusiasm, and dermatology as a specialty came into its own. The details of the Willan approach and the overwhelming influence it exerted on the future of the specialty are described in this article. 1798, the year the section was published, was an annus mirabilis for dermatology, and 1998 can be considered the bicentennial of the birth of the specialty.