THE COMPLEX OF ECZEMA

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Abstract
To the practitioner trained from ten to twenty years ago in this country, exudative inflammation of the skin is "eczema." Neither dermatitis nor eczema is a disease. Both are complexes made up of a number of components or factors, expressed in the objective sign language of the skin, which includes erythema, vesiculation, oozing, crusting, scaling, fissuring, thickening and hyperpigmentation. These signs are, so to speak, the strings on which etiology plays the complex symphonies of discomfort, not to say misery, disfigurement and incapacity, which are dermatitis and eczema. The Germans, able students of the details of pathologic mechanisms, call eczema that form of dermatitis in which the epidermis exhibits an intrinsic quality of hypersensitiveness to irritants, specific or general.1About 5 per cent of all human beings exhibit this intrinsic hypersensitivity. In order to clarify the field of "eczema" I propose, for the moment,notto adopt this definition

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