International Keloid Symposium
The Father of French Dermatology
A village boy who became Baron, court physician, and the first to name keloids — Jean-Louis-Marc Alibert founded the world’s first hospital school of dermatology at the very institution that will host the symposium two centuries later.
When the international keloid community gathers at Hôpital Saint-Louis in June 2027, it returns to the building where, in 1806, a young Parisian physician first described a curious group of scars that grew like crab’s claws. He called them cancroïdes; eleven years later, satisfied that they were not in fact cancer, he renamed them chéloïdes.
The name has stuck for two centuries. So has the institution where he made it. So, less officially, has his title — for in 1827, King Charles X made him a Baron.
His Life
Jean-Louis-Marc Alibert was born on May 2, 1768, in Villefranche-de-Rouergue, a small bastide town in the Aveyron department of southern France, where his father was a magistrate. He was educated locally and then sent on to Toulouse, where he studied with the brothers — philosophy, literature, Greek, Latin, and theology — and entered a noviciate, intending to take holy orders.
The French Revolution decided otherwise. When religious orders were dissolved and seminaries closed, Alibert’s path closed with them. He made his way to Paris, where the philosopher Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis and the physician Pierre Roussel introduced him to the salon of Madame Helvétius in Auteuil — the gathering place, after the Terror, of every progressive physician in the capital. It was at Auteuil that he met Philippe Pinel, René-Nicolas Desgenettes, Anthelme Richerand, Guillaume Dupuytren, Gaspard Laurent Bayle, and Joseph Récamier.
From seminary to medical school
On 4 December 1794, the Revolutionary Convention created the new Écoles de Santé to rebuild medical education from the ruins of the abolished faculties. Alibert sat the entrance examination of the Paris school on 20 February 1796 and was admitted. He attended the clinical lectures of Jean-Nicolas Corvisart at La Charité, of Pinel at La Salpêtrière, and of Pierre-Joseph Desault, the first professor of surgical clinics at the Hôtel-Dieu and teacher of Xavier Bichat.
That same year, Alibert helped found the Société médicale d’Émulation, becoming its first Secretary General. The Society was a learned association established by Bichat, by the army surgeon Dominique-Jean Larrey, and by Alibert himself; for the next two decades it would publish many of his most important early papers — including his foundational essay on the keloid. On 19 November 1799 (28 Brumaire, Year VIII of the Republic), Alibert defended his doctoral thesis on the pernicious fevers under Pinel. He was thirty-one years old.
The lime trees of Saint-Louis
In 1801, the Comité des hôpitaux de Paris — of which Cabanis was a member — appointed Alibert médecin-adjoint at the old Hospice du Nord, soon renamed Hôpital Saint-Louis. He was promoted to titulaire in 1802 and to chief physician (médecin chef) in 1819. The hospital’s official dedication to skin diseases on 27 November 1801 is the conventional founding of the French school of dermatology.
Alibert began teaching in the small amphitheatre of the Pavillon Gabrielle, but his audience grew so large that he moved his demonstrations outdoors — beneath the lime trees in front of the pavilion. Three lectures a week, attended by physicians from across Europe. His teaching style was as theatrical as it was scholarly: rhetorical flourishes, Latin citations, anecdotes drawn from his Greek and Roman reading. He once memorably characterised a syphilitic prostitute as “a priestess of Venus, wounded by a perfidious dart of love.”
Suspended from the lowest branches of the trees were paintings of various skin diseases. Behind the platform stood the Sisters, ready to conduct the patients to him.— Paul E. Bechet, on Alibert’s open-air clinic, 1938
A copy of the Tree of Dermatoses stood on his platform. Patients walked forward one by one, each bearing a placard with the name of their condition. The audience was a mix of medical students, visiting physicians, and curious society figures, drawn from every corner of Europe.
Physician to two kings
In 1815, with the Bourbon Restoration, Alibert was appointed personal physician to King Louis XVIII. By 1818 he had been promoted to premier médecin ordinaire du Roi. He spent his winters at the Tuileries and his summers at Saint-Cloud; for fourteen years, the clinic at Saint-Louis went on without him. When Louis XVIII died on 15 September 1824 — Alibert constated the death — the new king, Charles X, retained him in the same office. As a reward for his service, Charles X elevated Alibert to the rank of Baron by letters patent on 6 November 1827.
On 26 April 1829, after fourteen years at court, Alibert returned to Saint-Louis. He resumed his lectures under the lime trees and — by Bechet’s account — unveiled the great visual project of his career, the Arbre des Dermatoses, on that same day. He died at home in Paris of gastric cancer on 4 November 1837, aged sixty-nine. He was buried at Père-Lachaise; his remains were transferred on 6 June 1838 to the Chapelle des Pénitents Noirs at Villefranche-de-Rouergue, and later to the Chapelle Saint-Jacques.
His circle
Alibert’s apartment at 4 Rue de Varennes was a meeting place for the leading minds of his era. The actor Talma declaimed there; the singers Garat, Rubini, and Lablache sang; the poets Louise Colet and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore recited their verses. His medical intimates were Ribes, Dupuytren, Corvisart, Portal, Cabanis, and Larrey. He was, by every account of his contemporaries, jovial, witty, generous, and sociable — a temperament that contrasted sharply with the austere bearing of his eventual successor at Saint-Louis, his pupil Laurent-Théodore Biett.
His Work
Alibert’s professional life turned on a single, transformative idea: that diseases of the skin deserved careful clinical study as a discipline of their own. Before him, cutaneous conditions had been treated as an undifferentiated mass of “eruptions”; after him, dermatology was a recognisable medical science with its own vocabulary, its own classification, and its own culture of bedside teaching.
An academic life
Alongside his hospital and court duties, Alibert was a public figure of considerable academic standing. On 27 December 1820 he was elected to the Medicine section of the new Académie de médecine, in whose foundation he had assisted alongside Baron Portal. On 2 February 1823 he was named to the Chair of Therapeutics and Materia Medica at the Paris Faculty of Medicine by royal decree. In 1827 the French Academy awarded him a prize of 4,000 francs for his philosophical treatise Physiologie des passions.
A man of letters as much as medicine
Alibert’s reading was as deeply classical as it was scientific. He wrote published biographies of the natural philosophers Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729–1799) and Luigi Galvani (1737–1798), authored numerous memoirs and éloges for the Société médicale d’Émulation, and was — by the assessment of the Medical Examiner‘s 1838 obituary — “one of the most brilliant writers of philosophical or literary medicine.” His medical work cannot entirely be understood apart from this literary sensibility.
Major contributions to the discipline
First description of the keloid
The first physician to give an accurate and detailed description of keloids as a distinct disease entity — and to coin the term chéloïde from the Greek for “crab’s claw” in 1817.
The Tree of Dermatoses
An iconic visual classification of cutaneous diseases organised, in the manner of the botanists, into a single tree of families, genera, species, and varieties.
The Saint-Louis school
Founded the world’s first major school of dermatology, attracting generations of students from across Europe and, later, the Americas.
Landmark treatises
Authored nine major works on cutaneous diseases, therapeutics, and the physiology of the passions — many beautifully illustrated with hand-coloured engravings.
Open-air bedside teaching
Pioneered a model of open clinical demonstration with named patients beneath the lime trees of the Pavillon Gabrielle — the prototype of all modern dermatology teaching.
An academic chair
Elected to the Académie de médecine in 1820 and appointed by royal decree to the Chair of Therapeutics and Materia Medica at the Paris Faculty of Medicine in 1823.
First descriptions credited to Alibert
Beyond the keloid, Alibert is credited with the first descriptions of several other cutaneous diseases — including mycosis fungoides (first described as pian fongoide in 1806; the patient, a 56-year-old man named Lucas, is illustrated in his monograph), tinea amiantacea, cutaneous leishmaniasis, dermatolysis, and the congenital nevus. He coined the very word dermatose, which entered the medical vocabulary of every European language.
Naming the Keloid
Among the patients of Hôpital Saint-Louis in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Alibert observed a peculiar group of scar-like growths that did not behave like ordinary scars at all. They extended laterally beyond the boundaries of the original wound, sending out small branching projections into the surrounding healthy skin. They recurred relentlessly after excision. And — most strikingly to the early-19th-century eye — they had pathological features that, on first inspection, resembled cancer.
In the first edition of Description des maladies de la peau, published in 1806, he gave them his first name for them: les cancroïdes de la peau — the “cancroid” or cancer-like growths of the skin. The classification was placed near his family of dermatoses cancéreuses.
Over the next decade, careful observation persuaded him that the diagnosis of cancer was wrong. The lesions were emphatically not malignant: they did not metastasise, they did not invade vital structures, and they grew with a peculiar horizontal extension all their own. A new name was needed.
From the Greek χηλή (chele) — “the claw of a crab” — combined with the suffix -oides (“resembling”). The name captures Alibert’s clinical observation of the claw-like extensions of the lesion into the surrounding skin, a feature still recognised today as one of the cardinal signs distinguishing a keloid from a hypertrophic scar. The orthography chéloïde, fixed in his 1817 paper, has been preserved in every European language since.
The definitive description, 1817
In 1817, in volume eight of the Mémoires de la Société médicale d’Émulation, Alibert published his definitive paper: “Quelques recherches sur la chéloïde” — Some researches on the keloid (pages 744–752). It contained five careful case observations and the first illustration of the lesion. The description is still recognisable today:
The cancroïdes are carniform excrescences, sometimes oval, sometimes oblong, situated horizontally on one or several parts of the integument, pale rose in colour… extending out from their borders at times small bifurcated prolongations which bear some resemblance to the claws of a crab, which fact clearly justifies the name we have given to these extraordinary tumours.— Alibert · Quelques recherches sur la chéloïde · 1817
Alibert was not strictly the absolute first physician to mention keloids. The Edwin Smith Papyrus, from about 1700 BC, may describe one; the French physician Noël Retz (1758–1810) recorded one in 1790. But Alibert’s was the first accurate and detailed description, with five carefully observed cases and the first illustration — and his nomenclature is the one that has lasted. In 1849, the English physician Thomas Addison would distinguish two forms: the “false keloid” of Alibert (our modern keloid) and a “true keloid” later recognised as morphea — sometimes called Addison’s keloid. The Alibert version is the disease the symposium gathers to study.
The Tree of Dermatoses
Alibert was a man of the Enlightenment encyclopedist generation, and he believed that diseases of the skin, like the species in a botanical garden, could be classified in a single ordered structure. He drew his inspiration directly from the great botanists Bernard and Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, whose “natural method” of plant classification was the model for his own.
The result was his most enduring visual legacy: cutaneous diseases as the branches of a single tree. He unveiled it on 26 April 1829 — the very day he returned to the hospital after fourteen years at court — and reissued it in colour in his Monographie des dermatoses of 1832.
How the tree is structured
The cartouche at the base of the tree, in Alibert’s own elegant script, lays out the architecture of his classification:
“Arbre des Dermatoses : Cet arbre figure le Derme, les branches principales les diverses maladies qui lui sont particulières, les Rameaux indiquent les genres, les Ramuscules les Espèces et les variétés.”
“Tree of Dermatoses: This tree figures the Dermis; the principal branches the various diseases peculiar to it; the smaller branches indicate the genera, the twigs the species and the varieties.”
- The trunk represents the dermis itself — the common ground of all cutaneous disease.
- The twelve main branches are the great classes of dermatoses.
- The smaller branches (rameaux) mark the genera within each class.
- The smallest twigs (ramuscules) name the species and varieties, often in the elegant handwritten script of his original plates.
Notice, at the base of the trunk, the small green serpent — the symbol of Asclepius, coiled around the rod — and the distant mountains visible behind.
The twelve great classes
It was an audacious gesture for its time. A copy of the tree stood on the platform during Alibert’s open-air lectures; he is said to have remarked that “the Tree of Dermatoses casts its shade over the students, and offers them the fruits of its instruction.”
Botany meets dermatology
The science was, however, doomed. Alibert’s own pupil Laurent-Théodore Biett, returning from a visit to London in 1816, had been won over to the rival system of Robert Willan — a classification based on the elementary lesion (papule, pustule, vesicle, and so on) rather than on imagined morphological families. By 1826 the two systems coexisted, uneasily, in the same hospital; the pupils of one openly ridiculed the pupils of the other. Willan’s lesion-based method eventually won, and is still used today.
Yet the image outlasted the classification. The Tree of Dermatoses is one of the most reproduced documents in the history of medicine, and the Société Française d’Histoire de la Dermatologie has adopted it as its logo. It remains a powerful symbol of an attempt — branch by branch, leaf by leaf — to bring order to a chaotic discipline.
His Publications
Alibert was a prolific author. He published across three principal subjects: cutaneous diseases, general therapeutics, and the philosophical “physiology” of human emotion. His atlases were renowned for their finely engraved colour plates — beautiful objects in their own right, and powerful teaching tools at a time when most physicians had never seen the diseases they read about. The cost of the engravings was, at times, ruinous: a second volume of his Nosologie naturelle was simply never published because Alibert could not afford the printing.
Description des maladies de la peau observées à l’Hôpital Saint-Louis
The foundational treatise. Published by Barrois l’aîné et fils at 13 Rue de Savoie, Paris. The first sketch of his life’s work; contains the original “cancroïde” description of keloids and the first description of “pian fongoide” (later mycosis fungoides). Bears a Latin epigraph from Pliny: “Scrutare tu causas, potes enim, quae tanta miracula efficiunt…”
Expanded second edition of Description des maladies de la peau
An expanded and updated edition of his foundational dermatologic atlas, incorporating further clinical material from his work at Hôpital Saint-Louis.
Quelques recherches sur la chéloïde
Published in Mémoires de la Société médicale d’Émulation, vol. 8, pp. 744–752. The definitive description of keloids — with five case observations and the first illustration of the lesion. The orthography chéloïde, fixed in this paper, has remained in every European language since.
Nosologie naturelle, ou les maladies du corps humain distribuées par famille
Volume one of an ambitious project to classify all human disease in natural families, in the manner of the botanists. The cost of the engravings was so high that the second volume was never published.
Nouveaux éléments de thérapeutique et de matière médicale
Written during his tenure as Chair of Therapeutics and Materia Medica at the Paris Faculty of Medicine. A major textbook on the treatment of disease across all of medicine, based on the physiology of Bichat.
Physiologie des passions, ou nouvelle doctrine des sentiments moraux
A philosophical work on the physiology of human emotion, for which Alibert received the French Academy’s prize of 4,000 francs in 1827. Revised second edition in 1826–1827.
Monographie des dermatoses
A mature synthesis of his life’s work, containing the most famous and most reproduced version of the Tree of Dermatoses. A second edition appeared in 1835 with Germer Baillière.
Clinique de l’Hôpital Saint-Louis
Published 1832–1834. Sixty-three hand-coloured engraved plates retouched with brush — luxurious folio editions too expensive for the average student. The affordable summary appeared as the Monographie above.
Biographical writings
Alongside his medical work, Alibert wrote biographies of the natural philosophers Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729–1799) and Luigi Galvani (1737–1798), as well as numerous memoirs and éloges for the Société médicale d’Émulation.
Images from his life and work
A visual record of Alibert, his patients, his publications, and his iconic Tree of Dermatoses.
L’Arbre des Dermatoses
Alibert’s celebrated visual classification of skin diseases, organising the entire field into a botanical hierarchy of families, genera, species and varieties. From his Monographie des dermatoses (1832).
Jean-Louis-Marc Alibert
Painted portrait of Alibert as physician to King Louis XVIII and Charles X.
Baron Alibert (Delpech, Paris)
A nineteenth-century lithographic portrait by the Maison Delpech, signed beneath the image as “Bᵒⁿ Alibert” — Baron Alibert. Made after his elevation in 1827.
La Vaccine au château de Liancourt
Painting by Constant Joseph Desbordes: Alibert performing a smallpox vaccination at the country estate of the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt. The poet Marceline Desbordes-Valmore posed as the mother. Musée de la Chartreuse, Douai.
Description des maladies de la peau
Title page of Alibert’s foundational treatise — observed at Hôpital Saint-Louis and published by Barrois l’aîné et fils at Rue de Savoie n°13, Paris.
Lépreuses, Cancéreuses, Dartreuses
Close-up of the leprous, cancerous, and dartrous branches — the family within which Alibert grouped his original description of chéloïde as cancroïde de la peau.
Vérôleuses, Strumeuses, Scabieuses
Close-up of the pox-like, scrofulous, scabious, and haematic branches — showing the hand-lettered species and varieties in Alibert’s elegant copperplate.
A Life in Dates
Legacy
Alibert’s influence radiated outward from Hôpital Saint-Louis through generations of students. The institution remained the world centre of dermatology for the better part of a century, and almost every great nineteenth-century European and American dermatologist passed through it. The lineage below traces only the principal Parisian heirs.
The Saint-Louis school
Laurent-Théodore Biett
Alibert’s favourite pupil. Brought back from London in 1816 the rival Willanist classification, sparking the famous Alibert-Biett split. First to describe lupus erythematosus as “érythème centrifuge”.
P. L. Alphé Cazenave
Pupil of Biett; succeeded Alibert. Co-authored the influential Manual of Diseases of the Skin (1828) with Schedel. Founded the first French dermatology journal in 1843. First to describe pemphigus foliaceus, 1850.
Camille Melchior Gibert
Pioneer description of pityriasis rosea (1860). Author of well-known manuals on skin and venereal disease, including “Gibert’s syrup” for syphilis. Died of cholera.
Marie Guillaume Alphonse Devergie
Succeeded Biett in 1841 and served 24 years. First to describe pityriasis rubra pilaris (1857). Donated the watercolours that became the nucleus of the future Musée des Moulages.
Antoine Pierre Ernest Bazin
First described acne keloid, hydroa vacciniforme, erythema induratum, and seborrhoeic dermatitis. Reclassified Alibert’s mycosis fungoides in 1870 — giving us the Alibert–Bazin syndrome.
Louis Phillippe Alfred Hardy
The last of the great pupils. First description of pigmentary syphilides. His Dartrous Diathesis was translated into English by Henry G. Piffard in 1868 — bringing French dermatology to America.
Across the Atlantic
Almost every American pioneer of nineteenth-century dermatology made the journey to the lime trees of Saint-Louis. Henry Daggett Bulkley, the first to teach dermatology in the United States, was a pupil of Biett and Cazenave in 1831. Noah Worcester, author of the first American dermatology textbook (1845), studied there in 1841. L. Duncan Bulkley, Henry G. Piffard, and Louis Duhring all followed. For most of a century, the wards of Saint-Louis were the global centre of dermatology, and the line that runs from Alibert to American medicine is short and direct.
The site of the symposium
Hôpital Saint-Louis
Founded by Henri IV in 1607 · Dedicated to skin diseases in 1801Hôpital Saint-Louis is the second-oldest hospital in Paris. Its cornerstone was laid by King Henri IV on 13 July 1607, named for his ancestor Louis IX, who had died on Crusade in Tunis in 1270. Its plans were drawn by Claude Chastillon — the same hand behind the Place des Vosges — and construction was supervised by Claude Vellefaux, after whom the hospital’s avenue is named to this day. Opened in 1616 as an overflow facility for the Hôtel-Dieu during outbreaks of plague, it was officially dedicated to the treatment of skin diseases on 27 November 1801, with Alibert at its head. It has remained one of the world’s foremost centres of dermatology ever since.
Musée des Moulages — The Wax Museum
Within the same hospital grounds stands the Musée des Moulages, the Museum of Medical Wax Models — and the venue for the symposium’s sessions in June 2027. The collection began in 1865, when Dr. Charles Lailler recruited Jules Baretta (1833–1923), a maker of cardboard fruit in the Passage Jouffroy, to cast skin lesions directly from his patients. Baretta would go on to make some 3,500 moulages over the next half-century. The museum building itself, designed by the architect Gustave-Léon Vera, was inaugurated in August 1889 as part of the Exposition Universelle de Paris — the same exhibition that gave the city the Eiffel Tower — on the opening day of the first International Congress of Dermatology.
A poetic accident on the map
Avenue Claude-Vellefaux runs in front of the hospital — it bears the name of the architect who built it in 1612. The avenue, opened in 1825, begins at its northern end at Rue Alibert, which was named for the founder of the school of dermatology. Architect and physician thus stand named at right angles to each other on the modern Paris map, in front of the building they each, in their separate centuries, helped to make famous.
What he left behind
- The first modern school of dermatology, established at Hôpital Saint-Louis and continuous to this day.
- The vocabulary of cutaneous disease — including the very words dermatose and chéloïde, still used in every language of medicine.
- The Tree of Dermatoses, one of the most reproduced images in medical history and the logo of the Société Française d’Histoire de la Dermatologie.
- A tradition of clinical bedside teaching that became the model for dermatology training worldwide.
- An international network of students who carried his methods and vocabulary across Europe and into the Americas.
A note on sources
This profile draws on the standard biographical reference (Brodier, Alibert, médecin de l’hôpital Saint-Louis, Paris: Maloine, 1933); Bechet’s “Jean-Louis Alibert” (1938); the official record of the Mairie of Villefranche-de-Rouergue; the Société Française d’Histoire de la Dermatologie; the archives of the AP-HP (Assistance Publique – Hôpitaux de Paris); Wallach’s “Choosing a dermatological hero for the millennium: Jean-Louis Alibert (1768–1837)” in Clinical and Experimental Dermatology (2000); and contemporary obituaries including the Medical Examiner (1838). Image attributions appear with each plate in the Gallery.
Visit the place where it began
Join the 7th International Keloid Symposium at Hôpital Saint-Louis —
the institution where Alibert first described the disease that gathers us today.
