Some aspects from the history of studying sarcoidosis

Abstract

The word sarcoidosis comes from the Greek word “sarcoid”, meaning “having flesh or tissue”, and the Greek suffix “-osis”, meaning “condition”, referring to skin lesions on various parts of the body. Over the course of history, sarcoidosis has been consistently dealt with by physicians of various specialties. The palm of victory belongs to dermatologists, and further for quite a long period of time, phthisiatricians dealt with this problem, then pulmonologists, and, more recently, doctors of many other specialties. The term “Besnier-Boeck-Schaumann disease” was officially approved at the congress of dermatologists in Strasbourg in 1934. This name of the disease has been preserved to the present for a little less than 90 years. However, it should be noted that in recent years their names in the headlines and texts of articles are mentioned much less frequently. To our knowledge in the PubMed information registry, only one paper was published in 2022 on various clinical and experimental studies of sarcoidosis, which mentions the name of the disease as “BesnierBoeck-Schaumann disease”. For illustration, several presentations of own clinical and radiological observations are given, identical in their pathogenetic parameters, noticed and described for the first time by Besnier, Boeck, Schaumann and Löfgren. These presentations are formed using modern diagnostic technologies, which significantly expand the visualization possibilities of sarcoidosis variants and fully reveal the fullness of the symptom complexes that were noticed and described by the path-breakers of sarcoidosis.