To familiarize ourselves with the clinical entity known as sarcoidosis, some of the general features of the disease will be taken up before the ocular manifestations are considered.
History
In retrospect, probably the first case of sarcoid was recorded by Jonathan Hutchinson in 1869, under the name of Mortimer's malady. Then in 1889, Besnier described another case but thought it was different from the case of Hutchinson, so he called it lupus pernio. Boeck, in 1899, described a patient with skin nodules and did the first histologic examination of a lesion. He thought that histologically the lesion resembled a sarcoma and therefore called the lesion sarcoid. He recognized that Mortimer's malady, described by Hutchinson, was of a similar character. In 1902, Kienboch first described the cyst-like changes of the small bones in this disease. Heerfordt, in 1909, noted uveitis associated with enlargement of the parotid gland, but this was not