SKIN DISEASES TREATED BY BLOOD 

 VACCINE. 



By E. W. J. Ireland, M.B., CM. 



(Read loth October, 1910.) 



Dr. Grove W. Wende, of Buffalo, as Chairman of 

 the Section of Dermatology of the American Medical 

 Association, in an address in St. Louis, June, 1910, 

 devoted his attention to the consideration of Skin 

 Diseases to Medicine as a Vvhole. He laid stress on the 

 fact that specialising- in one branch of medicine tended 

 to narrowness of observation and loss of perspective that 

 impaired the broadest utilisation of the observations made. 

 He considered it advisable that dermatologists should 

 make some efifort to bridge the ever-widening separation 

 between that specialty and the field of internal medicines. 

 General cases should be sought and discovered, and the 

 work of the clinique and the laboratory should be united 

 in the investi£:ation of causes and broad relations. 



'J-5' 



With the exception of parasitic and local inflammatory 

 affections of the skin, it may be said that skin diseases 

 are for the most part simply superficial local manifesta- 

 tions or complications of general or special morbid states. 

 Skin diseases, in short, are nothing but symptoms in many 

 cases. 



Crude notions of a Ijlood diathesis still persist with 

 the profession. Thus the uric acid diathesis theory of 

 skin affections is nothing but misleading — the cloak of 

 ignorance. Tliere may be an element of truth under- 

 lying some of these crude notions, because metabolic 

 processes form the foundation of life, and errors of 

 metabolism may be presumed to account for many of 

 the variations from normal in the different tissues and 

 functions of the l^ody. He nnstances tht^ follovv'ing 

 diseases as especially calling for co-operation between 

 dermatologists and internists — exudative erythema, aften 



