ABSTRACT
EUGENE MARK FARBER was born in Buffalo, New York on July 24, 1917. He grew up in a family of books, brains, and brothers. Four of his brothers became doctors—one the internationally renowned Sidney Farber, the founder of the field of chemotherapy for cancer and also of eponymic fame: Farber’s lipogranulomatosis. The fifth brother became a professor of philosophy. He left his home city to attend college at Oberlin in Ohio, where he excelled in basketball and track. Returning to the University of Buffalo for his M.D., he subsequently took a residency in dermatology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. There, he not only published on the previously unrecognized hypertensive ulcer, but also proved the effectiveness of the first antihistaminic, Benadryl®. By 1948 he had joined the faculty at Stanford Medical School in San Francisco. They provided him with only a 4×8 foot cubicle for his research, but it was in a matrix of unmatched intellectual stimuli. He dedicated his life to teaching, clinical care, and basic research, focusing on psoriasis in all its forms.
