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To the Editor:
The comments of Drs. Richard B. Stoughton and Fillmore K. Bagatell (Archives of Dermatology 85:543, 1962) concerning the paper "Observations on the Biochemical Genesis of Acantholysis" (Archives of Dermatology 84:459, 1961) by J. M. Einbinder and myself were of great interest to me, and the following discussion is submitted in reply.In our work, injections were also intradermal rather than intraepidermal. The appearance of the word intraepidermal in the manuscript is an unfortunate typographical error. Our experiments using human skin injected with HgCl2 and then exposed to cantharidin can therefore be compared to theirs, despite the fact that they used somewhat higher concentrations of HgCl2. In both sets of experiments the amount of HgCl2 injected was very large by biochemical standards. Consequently, the number of tissue-protein-mercaptide-Hg complexes formed was probably quite comparable in the experiments under discussion, regardless of the laboratory in which