- Robert Willan
Robert Willan (born
12 November ,1757 nearSedbergh ,Yorkshire ; died7 April ,1812 ,Madeira ) is the founder ofdermatology as a medical specialty. He received his MD in Edinburgh in 1780 and was elected a Fellow of theRoyal Society in 1809. He was educated atSedbergh School .From 1781 Willan practised medicine in
Darlington and then moved to London in 1783 as physician to the new Carey Street Public Dispensary, where he remained until 1803 teaching alongside Thomas Bateman. Willan and Bateman working together provided the world's first attempt to classify skin diseases from an anatomical standpoint.In 1790 Willan received the
Fothergillian Medal from theMedical Society of London for his classification of skin diseases. In the same year he published an account entitled "A Remarkable Case of Abstinence", which detailed the case of a young Englishman who died in 1786 after fasting for 78 days - one of the earliest accounts ofeating disorder s in males.In 1798 Willan described the occupational disease psoriasis diffusa, which affects the hands and arms of bakers, and in 1799 first described the exanthematous rash of childhood known as erythema infectiosum.
Willan's 1808 book, "On Cutaneous Diseases" is a landmark in the history of dermatology and in medical illustration and contains the first use of the word "lupus" to describe cutaneous
tuberculosis .References
* Evans, A. S. and Kaslow, R. A. (1997). "Viral Infections of Humans". Springer. ISBN 0-306-44856-4
* Lee, H. S. J. (Ed.). (2002). "Dates in Infectious Diseases: A Chronological Record of Progress in Infectious Diseases Over the Last Millennium". Taylor & Francis. ISBN 1-84214-150-3
* Levere, T., Turner L'E, G. (2002). "Discussing Chemistry and Steam: The Minutes of a Coffee House Philosophical Society 1780-1787". Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-851530-8
* Porter, R. and Bynum, W. F. (Eds.).(2002). "William Hunter and the Eighteenth-Century Medical World". Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-52517-9
* Sebastian, A. (2000). "Dates in Medicine". Taylor and Francis. ISBN 1-85070-095-8
* Silverman, J. A. (1990). Anorexia Nervosa in the Male: Early Historic Cases. In Andersen, A. E. (Ed.). "Males with Eating Disorders" (pp. 3-8). ISBN 0-87630-556-7External links
* [http://www.whonamedit.com/doctor.cfm/1015.html Biography]
* [http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/node2000001.html On Cutaneous Diseases - Interactive text]
* [http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/pdf/10.1046/j.1523-1747.1998.00081.x Robert Willan's Description and Treatment of Cutaneous Diseases 1797/1798 A Bicentennial]
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