“My skin is turning hard and I've been told that nothing can be done,” said a seventy-four-year-old woman who had just moved to our area from the South. She had recently been carefully studied by a number of doctors during a five-day stay in a university hospital. They told her she had generalized morphea, a condition for which no treatment was known. Unlike them, we greeted her with great optimism. Surely, we could do something to stop the inexorable progress of the hardening of her skin. She did not have to be Lot's wife.

She had first noted the indurated firm areas on her chest, but they had extended in eight months to also involve her back and abdomen. Her skin felt tight and itchy. Last week her right calf also started to become involved with the firm slightly darkened patches, which now we could also detect on her right forearm and both elbows. The breasts were the worst areas, with very shiny hard skin. Her hands, feet and face were unaffected.

Her past history revealed she took no medications, had no allergies, neither smoked cigarettes nor drank alcohol, and had never had any prior skin disease. She had worked in a poultry plant dressing chickens for twenty years, but was now retired. We could elicit no history of skin trauma at her work or of any tick bite preceding the hardening of the skin.