Biographical detailsThis section has been translated automatically.
(¤ 1905, † 1985) Dermatologist, working in Wroclaw, Ann Arbor and Detroit
- Hermann Pinkus, son of Felix Pinkus, was born on 18.11.1905 in Berlin. He attended the Mommsen-Gymnasium in Berlin-Charlottenburg and passed the Abitur in 1923. Studied medicine in Berlin, Freiburg, Munich and Innsbruck, state examination in 1929, doctorate under Rhoda Erdmann. Dermatological training at the dermatological clinic in Breslau under Joseph Jadassohn and Max Jessner. Here close cooperation with Walter Freudenthal, who had separated solar keratosis from seborrhoeic keratosis a few years earlier. Freudenthal's description of the alternating columns of ortho- and parakeratosis in solar keratosis led to the description of the acrosyringium as a separate functional unit which can be separated from the epidermis.
- H. Pinkus's work in the field of tissue culture contributed to invalidate the work of Walter Frieboes, who described the epidermis as a syncytium interspersed with tonofibrils formed by connective tissue. Hermann Pinkus had to leave the Breslau skin clinic as a half-Jew (his father Felix Pinkus was Jewish). Pinkus emigrated to the USA and through the mediation of Marion B. Sulzberger was able to take up a position at the Institute for Experimental Cytology in Ann Arbor.
- Further training with Franz Blumenthal a former employee at the Charité. In 1940 he opened a private practice in Monroe, Michigan.
- In 1943 he received an offer from the head of the dermatology clinic at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, Loren Shaffer, to become a part-time professor. In 1960 he was elected to succeed Shaffer. Pinkus was a founding member of the American Society of Dermatology.
- Pinkus described several clinical pictures, such as fibroepithelioma, premalignes in 1953, which we now regard as a variant of basal cell carcinoma, eccrine poroma in 1956 and alopecia mucinosa in 1957, which is now regarded as an adnexotropic variant of cutaneous T-cell lymphoma. In 1974, he described the trichodiscoma, which he believed to be a benign tumour of the hair disc rather than a tumour of the follicular mantle.
- Pinkus' students included Herschel S. Zackheim, the Japanese Yutaka Mishima and Amir H Mehregan.
Prof. Dr. med. Peter Altmeyer