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To study about and reflect on the disease is to highlight the ways of seeing and saying what can a body and its power to be affected before fingerprints or traces that degrade it. This article exposes epistemological research on social representations brackets (where register know doctor) disease from the registry of Clinical Dermatology in the second half of the 19th century. This is resorted to an analysis of medical photographs preserved in archives of Colombia and Spain taking as discursive forms of seeing and saying the disease who have disfiguring effects in the body.

The Tinea hospital in Granada, Spain, was a charitable health facility founded in the 17th century and still treating patients well into the 20th century. The hospital accepted patients from anywhere, not only those residing in the surrounding area. We describe the hospital's founding and the characteristics of the patients and caregivers. We also discuss how tinea was considered at the time, including the typology and treatment protocols applied as well as diet and hygiene measures used. It is striking that a hospital so focused on treating a single disease did not produce studies on the condition or on the application of contemporary knowledge to guide treatment., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier España, S.L.U. and AEDV. All rights reserved.)

This article pays tribute to three Peruvian medical personalities: José Neyra Ramirez (1929-2012), Abelardo Tejada (1931-2013) and Oscar Romero Rivas (1929-2011), highlighting their valuable contributions to the field of Tropical Dermatology and Health Medicine that benefited public health and Peruvian medical education. The article mentions the formation of a group of young researchers called “The Anacoretas”, including professors Hugo Pesce, Enrique Encinas, Juan Francisco Valegas in Lima; and Enerst Nausk and Victor Manchego in Germany, who, with the support of the Peruvian and German governments promoted and created the first university research center of Tropical Medicine on the Pacific Coast of Latin America called Daniel A. Carrion Tropical Medicine Institute at Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima (TMI/UNMSM).

We review advertisements published in the journal Actas Dermosifiliográficas between 1909 and 1939. Treatments for sexually transmitted diseases were advertised with particular frequency, and they offer a case in point that exemplifies the close relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and medical journals., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier España, S.L. and AEDV. All rights reserved.)

Crisóstomo Martínez from Valencia was a pioneering microscopist in 17th-century Europe. The first microscopic representations of skin in Spain appeared in an 18th-century work by Martín Martínez. Microbiology and histopathology progressed considerably in the late 19th century thanks to anatomists like Maestre de San Juan and surgeons like Federico Rubio Galí. The first Spanish pathologist to specialize in dermatology was Antonio Mendoza, a colleague of José Eugenio de Olavide at the Hospital San Juan de Dios in Madrid. Claudio Sala and Juan de Azúa also made significant contributions, including the description of pseudoepithelioma. Several disciples of Santiago Ramón y Cajal and Jorge FranciscoTello, such as Lorenzo Ruiz de Arcaute and Guillermo de la Rosa King, consolidated the dermatology laboratory, but the Civil War sent many into exile or deprived them of their professional status. Juan Rubió in Barcelona and Julio Rodríguez Puchol in Madrid were the immediate predecessors of today's dermatopathologists., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier España, S.L. y AEDV. All rights reserved.)

Actas Dermo-Sifiliográficas was born in May 1909. At first, issues appeared in step with the academic year, but publication began to follow the calendar year in 1957. Volume 18 was skipped in 1926-7 in an effort to correct confusion in the numbering of volumes and pages of earlier issues. October 1928 saw the journal grow from 6 issues per year to 9. Although the Spanish Civil War brought publication to a halt during the 1936-7 academic year, Actas Dermo-Sifiliográficas was one of the first Spanish scientific journals to recover from the conflict. The initial print run of 100 copies was increased to 700 after the war. The content evolved over time: while originally conceived to provide a strict account of sessions of the Spanish Academy of Dermatology and Venereology (AEDV) -originally known as the Spanish Academy of Dermatology and Syphilology- the journal gradually came to include review articles, case reports, a section summarizing the content of international journals, news and various other types of writing. The editorial board and the association's board of directors were one and the same for many years. According to the earliest charter, the editor-in-chief was also the president of the association and the associate editor was the association's vice-president. The subjects of articles provide a faithful portrait of how the specialty has changed. Syphilis, a main concern before the introduction of penicillin in the 1940s, was sidelined afterwards. The appearance of 20th-century pharmaceuticals such as salvarsan, sulfa drugs, thiazides, and corticosteroids were soon reflected in the number of articles describing their use. Certain original contributions by Spanish authors to international dermatology first appeared in Actas Dermo-Sifiliográficas. Examples are Azúa's description of pseudoepithelioma and Covisa and Bejarano's of chancriform pyoderma. Volume 50 (1959), which included accounts of the 50th anniversary of the association and the journal, closed with a biography of Enrique Álvarez Sainz de Aja, the only founding member still living at that time., (Copyright © 2010 Elsevier España, S.L. y AEDV. All rights reserved.)

During the Nazi period experimentation on human subjects and the elimination of individuals considered to be unproductive members of society were carried out in a systematic fashion. Involved in these practices were many physicians, including dermatologists whose names are linked in one way or another to their specialty. Some, such as Reiter, are very well known. This review attempts to bring to light the identities behind the names we have given to diseases, clinical and histological signs, and syndromes in dermatology., (Copyright © 2010 Elsevier España, S.L. y AEDV. All rights reserved.)

The journal's centenary this year provides a good chance to analyze the changes that have taken place in Spanish dermatovenereology. At such an important milestone, the tendency is to highlight major scientific achievements while neglecting the many more mundane years. This historical critique aims to explain the merit of our mentors--given the adverse and unstable scientific, economic, and social situation--in merely aiming to copy the best of other more stable countries to create dermatology structures and programs from which we have all since benefited. Likewise, a more recent period and one about which less has been written--the 1980s--is evoked.

In this article by Juan de Azua, published in the second issue of Actas Dermosifiliográficas in 1909, the author reports his experience in 139 patients, most of them from Hospital San Juan de Dios, Madrid,Spain, and states he is sure that leprosy is a contagious disease. He discusses the factors related to contagion,which occurs in a closed and family environment, emphasizing socioeconomic factors such as hygiene and promiscuity. He considers direct contact to be important, though also recognizing indirect contact through drinks and food; he totally rejects a hereditary mechanism. Epidemiologically, he draws attention to the higher prevalence of the disease in Andalusia, though not forgetting "La Lepra de Ultramar [leprosy from distant lands]"-32 cases in Spaniards in Cuba and the Philippines. He believes isolation in hospitals or special sanatoriums, such as San Juan de Dios or San Lázaro in Santiago, Granada, and Seville, to be the best prophylaxis, and he considers it would be appropriate to create "Hospitals for poor lepers".

In light of the centenary of the Spanish Academy of Dermatology and Venereology, we recall a paper published in 1973 by José Cabré, an influential figure in dermatology at the time, and the first Spaniard to sit on the International Committee of Dermatology.

Brief comment is made on the first article published in the journal Actas Dermo-Sifiliográficas with photographic documentation of the case history and histological findings. It was written by the founder of the journal, Dr. Juan de Azúa, in 1909.

The first issue of Actas Dermo-Sifiliográficas appeared in May-June of 1909. Although not the first Spanish dermatology journal, it did provide a lasting forum where dermatologists could publish in Spanish at the same time as opening a window to the practice of dermatology throughout the world. Initially, the journal only included minutes of the Spanish Society of Dermatology (currently the Spanish Academy of Dermatology and Venereology [AEDV]), certain obituaries, and a section on foreign journals. The first issue of the journal is a good snapshot of the situation of the specialty in Spain 100 years ago. The proportion dedicated to venereology was substantial --more than half the total content. Venereology itself was dominated by syphilis, explaining why the journal retains the word <> in its title. The catalyst for starting the journal was Juan de Azúa, who was also president of the society, with the help of Sánchez-Covisa as recording secretary, and Miguel Serrano as the society's treasurer and journal manager. The first collaborators were drawn almost entirely from the now defunct Hospital San Juan de Dios in Madrid.

Even before dermatology was born as a specialty at the beginning of the 19th century, most skin lesions and dermatoses tended to be treated by surgeons rather than physicians. After medicine and surgery were unified into a single discipline and dermatology emerged as a modern specialty, this relationship became blurred and Spanish dermatologists leaned more towards medicine than surgery. Then improvements in surgical techniques, knowledge of antiseptic and aseptic procedures, the development and introduction of anesthesia, and the greater interest in micrographic approaches led to the rediscovery and almost complete rebirth of this old surgical tradition in the second half of the 19th century. In Spain, dermatologic surgery as such did not really exist until the first third of the 20th century, when Enrique Alvarez Sainz de Aja and Vicente Gimeno emerged as the main exponents of this discipline. Of these 2, Alvarez Sainz de Aja drawing on his previous experience as a general surgeon and obstetrician was the better practitioner of the incipient dermatologic surgery. The other, Gimeno, wrote an interesting booklet on dermatologic surgery that was published in 1923 and that formed the basis of his inaugural speech to the Spanish Royal National Academy of Medicine.

Actas Dermo-Sifiliográficas was founded by Juan de Azúa in May 1909. The birth of the journal coincided with the founding of the Spanish Academy of Dermatology and Venereology, then known as the Spanish Society of Dermatology and Syphiligraphy, and it is this organization's official publication. Actas Dermo-Sifiliográficas gradually became established, until the year 1936, when its publication was interrupted for 14 months at the start of the Spanish Civil War. It resumed activity in October 1937 under Sainz de Aja, Gay Prieto and Eduardo de Gregorio. In the 1980's, it underwent a crisis that resulted in its exclusion from MEDLINE. Actas Dermo-Sifiliográficas gradually recovered under the management of Drs. Iglesias, Sánchez-Yus, Fernández-Herrera and Torrelo, and it has finally been included once again in the most consulted medical database in the world.

There are still numerous incompatibilities in the definitions of basic dermatological terms. In Spain, the problem is aggravated by the coexistence and conflict between two different semantic models, imported from other countries (France and the USA). These two models really have different "units": one model can be called "essentialist" and the other "nominalist". These models are not original to Spain; rather, each one shows the predominance or influence of an outside culture. Through a historical and evolutional study, we were able to verify that the origin of these semantic models goes back to Joseph Plenck and Robert Willan (essentialist model) and to Ferdinand Hebra (nominalist model), respectively. An analysis of these models from a historical perspective may help in understanding the origin of the current conflicts in the everyday use of Spanish dermatological semiology, and may therefore help resolve them.

San Isidoro of Sevilla (562-636) was a learned Spaniard of the early Middle Ages. His principal work, the Etymologies, is an encyclopedic treatise which analyzes the origin and meaning of about 5,500 terms corresponding to the different knowledge of his era. Liber IV of the Etymologies is dedicated to Medicine, and one of his chapters, titled De morbis qui in superficie corporis videntur (The diseases that are seen on the skin surface), studies 32 terms corresponding to skin diseases, so that this chapter represents the first text dedicated specifically to Dermatology in Europe. At the same time, according to the general plan of the work that includes each term with its origin and its definition, Liber IV (De Medicina) would be the oldest medical terminology dictionary known.