Harald, Otto Perry was born in Rochester, Minnesota, on November 18, 1921, and earned his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Minnesota in 1944.
1947 Ph. After an internship at the Naval Hospital in Oakland, California, he completed his dermatology training at the Mayo Clinic under Paul O'Leary. He joined the Mayo Clinic faculty in 1952 and practiced and taught there until his retirement in 1989. Although Perry was involved in all dermatology throughout his career, the wealth of material at the Mayo Clinic provided ample opportunity for him to identify and study in depth the rarer entities in the dermatologic catalog.
His work on pyoderma gangrenosum was seminal at the time. Other areas of research included autoimmunologic bullous diseases, pilomatrixomas, drug eruptions, skin manifestations of internal diseases, and the treatment of psoriasis.
In 1960 he described the "plaque-like form of cutaneous mucinosis", which was re-emphasized in 1974 by Gerd-Klaus Steigleder as "reticular erythematous mucinosis".