ABSTRACT
D.S.WILKINSON was born in Gillingham, Kent, England on August 7, 1919. After graduating from Epsom College, he went on to medical school at St. Thomas Hospital. Following wartime service in the Royal Navy (1942–1946) he returned to St. Thomas for dermatologic training under the legendary G.B.Dowling. By 1949 he was named Consultant in Dermatology in the small county of Buckinghamshire. To paraphrase Shakespeare, it proved to be “a dukedom large enough.” It was the dukedom that gave him a global view of dermatoses, unlike the fragmented, transitory experience of those in the great urban teaching centers of the world. In Aylesworth, England, he could study the long-term course of disease in a controlled population of 250,000. It was here in a regional, non-teaching hospital that he set up specialized clinics in contact, occupational, and environmental dermatoses, as well as venereology. His dukedom permitted him to detect and eliminate the worldwide problem of photosensitization due to soaps containing tetrachlorosalicylanilide. His patients permitted him to recognize toxic reactions never suspected in short-term testing, for example, necrotizing balanitis due to a newly formulated quaternium ammonium antiseptic. In his dukedom he described such entities as forefoot dermatitis, perioral dermatitis, equestrian chilblains, occupational sensitization to wood, and the glucagonoma syndrome.
