The men or women behind nevi: Sophie Spitz

摘要

An eponym is a person or a thing after which a particular place, object, discovery, disease, syndrome, and so forth, is named. In the field of medicine, and especially in dermatology, many eponyms are used, and physicians often do not know who is the man or woman behind them.The woman behind "Spitz nevus" was a pathologist, Sophie Spitz, who first described this lesion in 1948 as juvenile melanoma or melanoma of childhood. Spitz, in fact, noticed that the cytologic characteristics of this nevus were identical to those of melanoma; nevertheless, the lesion's behavior was, in general, benign. Spitz was born in 1910 in Nashville, Tennessee, in a German Jewish family. When she was young, she had a passion for musicand especially forthe violin.