It has been suggested that good specialty choices for color-blind physicians would be psychiatry and neurology, while anesthesiology, emergency medicine, and dermatology might represent problems. 10 Insect bites can lead to malaria, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, borreliosis, and other infectious diseases. Daily bathing is a recent custom, with weekly or less frequent baths common 100 years ago. Infrequent bathing was even more common several hundred years ago. Perhaps over the next few thousand years, human skin will become oilier as a protection against frequent bathing.
Pigmentation gives protection against sun damage.
Darkly pigmented individuals are less likely to have skin cancer, and albinos have a markedly increased incidence. However, in patients with xeroderma pigmentosum, an inherited disorder associated with pronounced sun sensitivity, defective deoxyribonucleic acid repair after ultraviolet injury, and a marked increase in skin cancer, skin cancers develop regardless of pigmentation. Thus, increased melanin pigmentation may have evolved for other reasons, such as camouflage and heat absorption. These ideas are stimulating and encourage our perennial questioning of why and how. J. Graham Smith, Jr., MD Editor References 1.