ABSTRACT
LOUIS ADOLPHUS DUHRING was born in Philadelphia, December 23, 1845. His family was prominent and well-to-do. As a boy he was studious, an avid reader. After an elementary education in private Philadelphia schools, and undergraduate work at the University of Pennsylvania, he entered the medical school of this university and was graduated in 1867, submitting a thesis entitled Nervous Gout. During his residency at the Philadelphia Hospital (Blockley) his interest in cutaneous medicine first became manifest, aroused in the beginning by a case of painful neuroma of the skin occurring in an old man under his care. On completion of his residency he traveled to Europe for special training in dermatology in which there was then little interest in this country. He spent the next two years studying European methods with the enthusiasm and intense concentration that marked every undertaking of his life. Berlin, Paris, and London in their turn came under his scrutiny, but it was in Vienna that he spent his most profitable months. Even the master of masters, Hebra, was impressed with his brilliant work. He also studied oriental skin diseases in Constantinople and leprosy in Norway. In 1871 he was appointed Lecturer on diseases of the skin at the University of Pennsylvania, Clinical Professor of Dermatology in 1876, and full Professor in 1890. He remained directly associated with the school until his retirement in 1910.
