What's in a name? Comments on the dermatological dictionary by Ledier, Rosenblum, and Carter.
BACKGROUND
Any scientific discipline needs a sharply defined set of words for exact and reproducible communication. Surprisingly this has never been a strong point in dermatological science, especially as regards the living gross pathology of skin disease.


OBJECTIVE
This article briefly reviews the four editions of a dermatological dictionary of words and phrases and gives some thoughts on their usefulness.


CONCLUSIONS
My conclusions are twofold: we need a new dictionary; at the very least, we need a reprinting of the fourth edition of "A Dictionary of Dermatologic Terms" by Carter.
Jackson
R
R
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. robertj@istar.ca
D003880:Dermatology; D004014:Dictionaries as Topic; D009626:Terminology as Topic