Alfred Blaschko

Who was Alfred Blaschko?

Alfred Blaschko was a German dermatologist who was a native of Freienwalde an die Oder.

In 1881 he earned his medical doctorate at Berlin, and afterwards worked with Georg Wegner in Stettin. Later he opened a private dermatological practice in Berlin.

Blaschko specialized in the study of occupational dermatoses and prophylaxis of venereal disease. He performed studies of prostitution and examined the sanitary conditions in this profession. In 1902 with Albert Neisser he co-founded the Liga zur Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten in Berlin.

In 1901 at the Seventh Congress of the German Dermatological Society held in Breslau, Blaschko presented his observations of a rare dermatological condition. It involved patterned skin lesions that were S-shaped on the abdomen, V-shaped over the upper spinal region with an inverted U-shape from the breast onto the upper arm. Blaschko had based his findings on examinations of over 140 patients with nevoid and acquired linear skin diseases. This unusual patterned condition was later referred to as "lines of Blaschko". Although he proposed an embryonic origin for this phenomena, he did not provide further detail in this regard.