Dr. J. Marshall (Arch Derm 87:419, 1963) has listed the factors which influence the incidence of skin disease and quoted the figures I obtained in regard to St. John's Hospital for Diseases of the Skin in 1951. It is, perhaps, of interest to compare these not only with other parts of the world, but also with Central London at other times.
In his textbook, Radcliffe-Crocker (1905) gave the incidence of skin diseases in ten thousand hospital outpatients in London.
I have recently compared these with the 1961 incidence in the Middlesex Hospital, London. The figures relate only to the most common disorders.
Although these three groups of figures originate in different hospitals, they are all in Central London and presumably are geographically comparable. Altered social conditions, particularly of the National Health Service, influence these figures so that they cannot be taken as a direct indication of the true incidence of