Abstract
Dermatomyositis was first described in the late nineteenth century by Ernst Wagner, and detailed descriptions of clinical course and skin disease by German physician Heinrich Unverricht led to its distinction from polymyositis. This leads to the rarely used eponym “Wagner-Unverricht syndrome.” Later discoveries included malignancy association (1916), details of cutaneous manifestations by Gottron (1930), differentiation from systemic lupus erythematosus (1942), and amyopathic dermatomyositis (1975). The first full postmortem examination of a child with dermatomyositis was published in 1912. Childhood cases represented 20 % of 338 cases reviewed in two large case series in the presteroid era in 1932 and 1939, although the differences between and childhood and adult dermatomyositis didn’t become clear until 1966.
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Crowe, D.R. (2016). Dermatomyositis. In: Crowe, D., Morgan, M., Somach, S., Trapp, K. (eds) Deadly Dermatologic Diseases. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31566-9_36
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