ABSTRACT
The skin as one of the body’s largest organs has many unique clinical, histological, and immunologic features which are reflected in CL. The most frequent type of cutaneous lymphoma is mycosis fungoides (MF), the first detailed description of which was given by Alibert in his atlas published almost 200 years ago. The Italian Bontius had already mentioned almost 200 years earlier, a disfiguring disease in natives of the Malaccan islands (now part of Indonesia). This probably was the first report on what we designate today as MF. Se´zary described in 1938 a leukemic and erythrodermic variant of MF, which had already been mentioned by von Zumbusch in 1915.Cutaneous T-cell lymphomas progresses through different stages usually designated as patches, plaques, and tumors. Therefore CTCL serves as a prototype disease to study lymphomagenesis from the very early stages to highly malignant diseases.
