ABSTRACT
Liaison dermatology may be defined as a branch of liaison psychiatry, the subspecialty of psychiatry that focuses on clinical service, teaching, and research at the borderland of psychiatry and medicine. In 1811 Benjamin Rush, a clinician and professor of medicine in Philadelphia, noted that the human being is, ‘‘in the eye of the physician, a single and indivisible being, for so intimately united are [the] soul and body, that one cannot be moved without the other. The actions of the former upon the latter are numerous and important.’’ However, development of liaison psychiatry in the United States has taken place only since the 1930s. The complex interplay of biological and psychosocial factors in the development, course, and outcome of all diseases is central to the concept of psychosomatic disorders (1).
