ABSTRACT
Sarcoidosis began life as a dermatological disease, and it
remains salutary today to marvel how early observers without
histology or X-rays delineated it as a separate entity. It
remains a matter of debate who recorded the first case, but
many credit Sir Jonathan Hutchinson. He observed a girl
with skin lesions and eye problems and followed her from
1865 to 1875 under the title of ‘relapsing iritis of inherited
gout’. In 1898 he reported another probable case of cutaneous
sarcoidosis as ‘Mortimer’s malady’. Meanwhile in Paris,
Besnier first used the term ‘lupus pernio’. Further cases
were described but it remained until 1914 for Schaumann to
recognize that these skin lesions were part of a systemic
disease. This was only fully acknowledged at the first
international conference on sarcoidosis in 1934.
