Clinical Conferences

D R. BEAN: The topic for the conference today will be the arterial spider of the skin' and other lesions of skin and mucous membrane which sometimes cause confusion in the minds of physicians. As background for the discussion I will start with a short autobiographic note. This chronicle may help answer a question many students have asked me: "How did you get started in clinical research?" I do not recall having noticed or having had called to my attention the vascular spider of liver disease when I was an undergraduate student of medicine at the UUniversity of Virginia. When I was an intern on Dr. Longcope's service at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, both Dr. Longcope and Dr. Hamman commented casually upon the spider and remarked on its frequent association with chronic liver disease. Neither one was able to give me any references to medical writings on the subject, nor was their own information very extensive. When I went to the Thorndike Laboratory in Boston I again sought information on the significance of the spider and found that no one at that fountainhead of clinical research could give me any additional help. I inquired of Dr. George Minot, Dr. Soma Weiss, Dr. Chester Keefer, Dr. William Castle and many of their colleagues but was able to get no more information than in Baltimore. Following this, my migration westward began. Arriving in Cincinnati, I found that the spider was well known. Dr. Blankenhorn was