ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the reader with historical sources from which the terms ‘eczema’ and ‘atopic dermatitis’ derive. In a lecture to the Dermatological Society of Great Britain and Ireland in 1902, esteemed German dermatologist Paul Gerson Unna summarized the history of eczema in the nineteenth century. White of Boston presented a paper entitled ‘Some of the causes of infantile eczema and the importance of mechanical restraint in its treatment’. The Hippocratic humoralist doctrine was the prevailing dogma of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medicine. ‘Disseminated neurodermatitis’ became a widely accepted name until the concept of ‘atopic dermatitis’ was introduced by Arthur F. Coca and Sulzberger in 1933. In the late nineteenth century, descriptions of prurigo, lichenification, neurodermatitis, and chronic eczema would be incorporated into precursors of atopic dermatitis such as disseminated neurodermatitis and prurigo Besnier. Ernest Besnier’s classic description of prurigos diathesiques was presented at the Societe Francaise de Dermatologie et de Syphiligraphie in 1892.
