Lwów School of Dermatology between World War I and II.

In 1918, after World War I, Poland obtained independence. This meant a significant development of the University of Lwow, one of the major Polish universities in that time.1 During the period between the world wars, Lwow, with two independent dermatology departments chaired by professors of dermatology and staffed by several assistant professors of dermatology, became one of the most important dermatology centers in Central Europe. During this period, Lwow was a place where many prominent Polish scientists of international recognition lived and conducted their research, including nonphysicians: Jakub Karol Parnas (1884-1949), a chemist who owed his worldwide recognition to the Embden-Meyerhof-Parnas pathway, and Hugo Steinhaus (1887-1972), a mathematician; and physicians: Franciszek Groer, Ludwik Fleck (18961961), a microbiologist and philosopher of science,2,3 Antoni Jurasz (1847-1923), an otolaryngologist, and Emanuel Machek (1852-1930), an ophthalmologist. Some of them, such as Groer and Fleck, directly influenced the development of dermatology. Fleck's achievements in this field may be found elsewhere.4 Franciszek Groer (1887-1965) graduated from Breslau University in 1911, where he met Clemens von Pirquet (1874–1929), an Austrian pediatrician world-famous for his contributions to the fields of bacteriology and immunology, who in 1910 assumed the Chair of Pediatrics at Breslau for 1 year. In 1912, Groer passed his doctoral diploma examinations in St. Petersburg, where he met Ivan Pavlov