Page:Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, volume 1.djvu/317

 disease was incurable; at all events, he had been unable to cure it, although various remedies had been tried. If a plaster were kept on for a time, when it was taken off a healthy skin was seen on the foot, the disease appearing to be quite cured, except for a little patch. From that patch, however, the disease recurred. He had tried to make cultivations in various media, without success. He hoped, however, that the investigation of this apparently incurable affection would be thoroughly undertaken.

Dr. Carnegie Brown said that he could throw little light of scientific importance upon the difficult subject of tropical dermatomycoses, but he had observed more than one peculiar feature in the method of trans- mission of dhobie itch. In the first place, infection was possible only when the skin was already inflamed. Dhobie itch did not develop on uninflamed skin ; there was necessarily a precedent erythema or intertrigo before the fungus would begin to grow, and that explained the sites of Tinea cruris. One very seldom, in fact, never, saw dhobie itch in any place except in the axilla, in the folds of the groin, in the perinseum, and between the nates. Dhobie itch, too, was inflammatory, while most other Tineas developed without concurrent inflammation. The microsporon infections of the scalp, the face, and the beard, such as the Tinea caused by trichophyton ectothrix, showed little or no inflammatory reaction to the growth. He should say that Tinea imbricata was also absolutely non-inflammatory. That eruption often looked somewhat angry, with red patches here and there in the earlier periods, but, doubtless, those were secondary infections; the disease itself did not set up inflammation or even hyperaemia of the deeper layers of the skin, while dhobie itch always did so. Another point was that, although the tropical physician saw this form of Tinea daily, almost the whole of his