EMOTIONS produced disease before the present interest in psychosomatic medicine. This statement may seem trite, but many people forget that the role of emotion in disease was well recognized by physicians long before the appearance of the present spate of papers on the subject. Certainly, the present interest in psychosomatic medicine is laudatory, but we should not forget that physicians throughout the ages have been very much concerned with this aspect of medicine.
In order to see what was being written concerning the emotions and their role in diseases of the skin, I recently reviewed Erasmus Wilson's two volumes of a century ago. The first of these, "Diseases of the Skin"1 is a 650-page text regarded as the standard work in dermatology of its day. The second, "The Skin and Hair,"2 was a short popular treatise on the subject. These volumes are replete with references