Ernest Besnier

Ernest Henri Besnier was a French dermatologist, born in Honfleur in 1831 and dead in Paris in 1909. He took his medical doctorate in Paris in 1857, became a hospital physician in 1863 and later succeeded Pierre-Antoine-Ernest Bazin as director at the Hôpital Saint-Louis, the great Paris hospital for skin disease. There he built histopathology and parasitology laboratories, and he is credited with originating the term biopsy for tissue samples. In 1889 he gave an early description of the skin lesions associated with sarcoidosis, introducing the name lupus pernio. With Pierre Adolphe Adrien Doyon he founded the journal Annales de dermatologie et de syphiligraphie, and in 1881 the two translated Moritz Kaposi's textbook of skin diseases from German into French, an effort to balance the French and Viennese approaches to dermatology. With Louis Brocq and Lucien Jacquet he published the four volume encyclopedia La pratique dermatologique between 1900 and 1904. Besnier's prurigo, a skin disorder that often follows infantile atopic dermatitis, is named after him.