Our primary objective several years ago in starting this study was to evaluate the usefulness of a new drug of low toxicity, mapharsen, for patients who had recovered from arsphenamine dermatitis of varying grades of severity. Moore and Keidel1 were the first to describe the procedure of intravenous testing. It is open to question whether intravenous testing is a desensitization procedure. Intravenous testing with mapharsen offered a new approach to this problem.
Foerster, McIntosh, Wieder, Foerster and Cooper,2 in their excellent original article on the clinical use of mapharsen, were the first to report administration of mapharsen to a patient who had recovered from arsphenamine dermatitis. They reported a single incident in which mapharsen was administered to such a patient, one dose being given, with recurrence of the dermatitis. They observed no cases of severe exfoliative dermatitis resulting from the use of mapharsen alone in the original study,