GIANT NEVUS OF THE THIGH SUCCESSFULLY TREATED BY COMPLETE EXCISION AND PRIMARY GRAFTING

Giant moles or nevi, while not a medical rarity, are uncommon. While there is hardly any one who does not have several moles on his body, those few unfortunate persons who have large areas of cutaneous surface occupied by enormous disfiguring nevi live under a real cosmetic handicap. That such cases are not exceedingly rare is evidenced by the rather voluminous literature dealing with them. The majority, however, are reported as medical curiosities since treatment has usually been beyond the scope of ordinary means. As far as we are aware, the mole in the present case is the largest that has ever been excised and the defect closed by grafts, in either single or multiple stages.

Admittedly the various giant nevi reported in the literature have not been histologically uniform. Pack and Sunderland¹ described 4 personal and 156 bibliographic cases of what they termed nevus unius lateris, the criteria