1 Festschrift to Professor

1 Lennox Eales 1 From the Department of Medicine, Univer- sity of Cape Town, and Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape Town, South Africa

This issue of CLINICS IN DERMATOLOGY, devoted entirely to the mechanism and clinical consequences of abnormalities in por- phyrin metabolism, is quite rightly dedicated as a festschrift to Lennox Eales, who recently has retired from the Chair of Clinical Medicine at the University of Cape Town.

Few would question the enormous contribution that Len Eales has made to this field, a contribution that started when Eales was a fifth-year medical student with a paper entitled “A case report of acute idiopathic porphyria,” published in Inyanga, the journal of the Medical Students’ Council of the University of Cape Town. Len

Clinics in

2 Kirsch and Benatar Dermatology

Eales graduated MB ChB in 1940, was award- ed an MD degree by the University of Cape Town in 1954, became a member of the Royal College of Physicians in 1946, and was elected to the Fellowship of the College in 1960. While much of his research was conducted in Cape Town, he held various traveling fellow- ships, including the Nuffield Dominion Med- ical Fellowship and the Rockefeller Fellow- ship, which allowed him to pursue his studies in Britain and in the United States. His more than 160 publications include many that have had a profound effect on the diagnosis and management of patients with acute por- phyrias. Equally interesting is the large number of young men who trained under Len Eales and who have retained their interest in the field of porphyria and continue to make contributions to the understanding of these diseases. Appropriately, this issue of CLINICS

IN DERMATOLOGY contains several papers by Len Eales’ present and former associates and covers most of the areas to which Len Eales has contributed over the past 45 years. Al- though his retirement has resulted in the loss of one of the field’s most colorful characters, Len Eales will enjoy his retirement with the knowledge that so many of the young physi- cians he trained have contributed and con- tinue to contribute to the knowledge of por- phyria.

It is with pleasure that we acknowledge the enormous contribution which he has made to the study of porphyria, to the Depart- ment of Medicine at the University of Cape Town, to the many students he has taught and, most of all, to the patients for whom he has cared during his long association with the University’s teaching hospital, Groote Schuur.

Address for correspondence: R. E. Kirsch, MB, ChB, MD, FCP(SA), P. 0. Observatory 7925, Cape Town, South Africa.