I am honored to have the opportunity to write this profile of Harvey Blank, MD, and his impact on dermatology. Having trained in dermatology in his department, having served on his full-time faculty for nine years, and, last year, having been appointed chairman of the department he founded and led for 29 years have made me intimately familiar with his impact. In my mind, however, my most compelling qualification for being given this opportunity is that I have lived through being an anxious admirer and student of Harvey's to being an admiring, longstanding friend. It is in this context that this view is given.
Harvey Blank, an only child, was born in Chicago in 1918. Science and the Boy Scouts interested him most as a youth. His interest in dermatology first developed when he was a medical student at the University of Chicago, where Samuel Becker, Sr, Maximilian Obermeyer, and