Diagnosis

The diagnosis of epithelioma, when actually existing, is surrounded with very few difficulties as the induration of the tissues is hardly to be met with in any other chronic cutaneous lesion; but the physician should be prepared as well to recognize conditions which will probably become epitheliomatous in time. It is this failure to diagnosticate an impending epithelioma that leads more frequently than it should to inefficient treatment and the sacrifice of lives that might otherwise have been saved. The face is the most frequent seat of purely cutaneous epitheliomata; and, if a physician cannot make up his mind as to whether a certain hard tubercle or a chronic ulceration is cancerous or not, his plain duty is to take his patient to some one who can.