Few experiences can be more harrowing for a young mother or more difficult for her attendants than to witness sudden and unexpected partial exfoliation of a previously healthy newborn baby. Yet the clinical condition remains little understood even in modern hospitals and appropriate measures of treatment and prevention are not universally adopted. In 1878, Ritter von Rittershain-a doctor employed in a Prague Foundling Asylum-described 297 cases of a strange exfoliative skin disease affecting the newborn (Von Rittershain, 1878). However, he did not consider the disease to be infectious and he failed to associate it with a less severe but more common concurrent epidemic of bullous impetigo (Benson, Rankin and Rippey, 1962). Twenty years later in London, Sir Jonathan Hutchinson recorded the verdict of a Coroner’s inquest into the death of a newborn child from ‘scalding of the skin’. Fortunately, the parents were exonerated frorn all blame due to the perspicacity of the pathologist concerned who, despite the lack of information in contemporary textbooks, had recognized four previous cases amongst 4000 post. mortems performed at Lewisham Infirmary (Jackson, 1974). These two reports appear to indicate that sporadic cases of this syndrome had been noted for many years but that outbreaks were uncommon until the newborn were segregated into foundling asylums or hospital nurseries. Alan Lye11 (1956), a Glasgow dermatologist, gave the condition its present name ‘Staphylococcal Scalded Skin Syndrome’ (SSSS). Yet even in 1981 a case was misdiagnosed and admitted to a regional burns unit from whence it was rescued by an experienced paediatrician taking an unauthorized short cut on his way to lunch (Fraser Williams, 1981). Skin diseases associated with blistering and exfoliation have been described in patients of all ages and may be classified as follows (Leading article, 1971). (1) SSSS mainly occurs in newborn children, and is due to toxin producing strains of Staphylococcus aureus. (2) Drug-associated toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN) is seen in patients of all ages, but more rarely in children. The most common aetiological agents are sulphonamides, anticonvulsants, barbiturates and butazones, but include certain other agents, such as penicillin (Manzella et al., 1980; Lowney et al., 1967). (3) A miscellaneous group is associated with virus infections (e.g.