[History of method of classification of dermatosis of modern and contemporary China].

ABSTRACT

The classification of individual things marks the depth of one's recognition on the general character of things. The method for the classification of dermatosis reflects the developmental level of dermatology from one aspect. Since modern time, there appeared a condition of the coexistence of multiple knowledge of medical systems, including traditional Chinese, western, amalgamation of traditional Chinese and western, and integration of Chinese and western. In the external medical system in TCM, skin diseases were always categorized under external medicine without detailed descriptions on any concrete specific skin disease, instead, only the morphological injury of skin were classified. The works of amalgamation of traditional Chinese and western medicine roughly classified dermatosis basically on the basis of the characteristics of morphological damage of skin, thus lifted out of the infancy of TCM dermatology; while in the works of integrating Chinese and western medicine, the disease terminology of western medicine and its method of classification were directly applied, and the traditional Chinese disease titles and classification methods were discarded. Thus, the descriptions under each disease with western medical terms eventually established a model for the diagnosis and treatment of skin diseases based on the integration of differentiating disease names by western medicine and differentiating syndromes by TCM, hence opening a new approach of developing TCM dermatology by modern scientific methods, a major feature of Chinese dermatology.