History of Latin American Dermatology

History of Dermatology in PeruThe first University Program for Specialization in Dermatology in PeruHISTORICAL BACKGROUNDThe education and training of doctors who practice Dermatology in Peru have followeddiverse formative routes.The hospital treatment centers and health services, both public (public welfare, HealthMinistry, social security, police and Armed Forces, and local governments) and private (privateclinics) took on —at first directly, and later through competitions— doctors who had acquiredexperience in skin and venereal diseases, be it through self-teaching, at the side ofprofessionals with practical knowledge in the subject and were heads of services in chargeof these ailments, or by having completed courses or exchanges in the subfield abroad.The contribution of two large Public Welfare hospital centers ever since their foundationmust be pointed out: that of the Dos de Mayo Hospital (men’s hospital) and ArzobispoLoayza Hospital (women’s hospital); there, the UNMSM’s St. Ferdinand MedicalSchool not only had highly qualified professional staff working in assistance posts whilebeing university professors, but also its own teaching and research facilities, thus constitutingteaching, research and treatment centers that have played – and still do – a veryimportant role in the university education of surgical doctors, medical researchers and,afterwards, specialists in the different medical branches.At the Arzobispo Loayza Hospital, a large treatment center of Lima’s Public Welfare,which later was transferred to the Health Ministry, the Dermatology and Syphilographyconsulting room, headed by Dr. Eleodoro Camacho in 1926, was occupied in 1927 by Dr.Aurelio Loret de Mola, who headed it in the 1930s, while he was also Senior Lecturer ofthe Chair of Dermatology and Syphilography at the UNMSM St. Ferdinand MedicalSchool. Dr. Pablo Arana was appointed Assistant Professor, giving birth to the first PeruvianDermatology School at that hospital, a school that had a very important role in undergraduateeducation in the specialized field and in the specialized training of manydoctors under the non-academic mode.This teaching and treatment structure had close links with that of Dr. Pedro Weiss,who, around 1926, was subhead of the Loayza Hospital Institute of PathologicalAnatomy, headed by Dr. Mackehenie, and who later, as Senior Lecturer of PathologicalAnatomy at the UNMSM, was founder of the important Peruvian School of Pathologists,with a special interest in Dermatopathology, Medical Mycology, Tropical Medicine andAnthropology; this relationship opened up a wide spectrum in the knowledge on the subject,and was of great importance for an appropriate approach to the specialized fieldand to Dermatology teaching.The interrelation between these two large medical schools – Loret de Mola’s DermatologySchool and Pedro Weiss’s Pathology School – was of long standing; as evidence ofthis, we can mention the activity of dermatologist Dr. Víctor Meth, who belonged to bothgroups, teaching in the old Chair of Dermatology, being Head of the Hospital Service ofDermatology, and at the same time acting as dermopathologist at the Pathology Departmentof the Loayza Hospital.As was pointed out in previous pages, in 1961 the professors of the St. FerdinandMedical School collectively resigned. In the face of this emergency, the university governmentarranged the transfer of all the material and human resources of this Departmentto Lima’s Dos de Mayo Hospital, and decreed its reorganization, entrusting thisdelicate mission to Dr. Zuño Burstein, Assistant Professor of the Chair of TropicalMedicine at UNMSM, who, as was set out above, had just arrived back from training inGermany and Israel.The Chair of Dermatology and Syphilography of the UNMSM Medical School was thusphysically located at Lima’s Dos de Mayo Hospital, starting, with the reorganization, anew institutional life.333