Significance of Food Hypersensitivity in Children with Atopic Dermatitis

Abstract: Some of us are old enough to recall reading Lewis Webb Hill's monograph entitled The Treatment of Eczema in Infants and Children (St. Louis: CV Mosby, 1956). Its epilogue is a quotation from Claude Bernard's Introduction to Experimental Medicine , words that seem most fitting as a prologue to this symposium:

It happens quite naturally that men who believe too firmly in their theories do not believe enough in the theories of others. We must disregard our own opinion quite as much as the opinion of others, when faced with the decisions of experience. When two physiologists, or doctors quarrel, each to maintain his own ideas or theories, in the midst of their contradictory arguments, only one thing is absolutely certain; that both theories are insufficient, and neither of them corresponds to the truth.… We really know very little, and we are all fallible when facing the immense difficulties presented by investigation of natural phenomena.

Nancy Burton Esterly, M.D.