Many people think that cancer is a recent disease, that it has appeared in the modern era because of the indortrial chemicals that are spread in the environment. But, in fact, the history of skin cancer goes way back in time, until around 2400 before Christ. At least the oldest documented proofs od skin cancer are that old. The samples examined under microscope and proved to be skin cancer belonged to some old Inca mummies that were discovered in Peru and studied in 1960. Scientists found melanoma tissue in the skin and also some metastases to the bones. Because the mummies were very well preserved and the skin was still intact, scientists could make observations and examinations and this is how they made the discovery. Oh, I forgot to mention that the mummies were carbon dated and found to be over 2000 years old.
If these were the first "patients" with skin cancer, the first doctor that operated on a metastatic skin cancer was the English John Hunter in 1787. He removed the affected tissue and preserved it, the samples getting later into the Hunterian Museum in England and they did such a good job that the experts couls examin it in 1968 and confirmed that the excised tumour was a skin cancer melanoma. But Hunter did not have a name for the ilness he operated on and he called it " a cancerous fungous excrescence".
The history of skin cancer crosses the English Channel and gets to France where the physician Rene Laennec described melanoma as being a disease of its own and a kind of skin cancer. He presented his report on this topic during a lecture at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris in 1804 and then published it in 1806.
An English GP, William Norris, came with a report of melanoma 14 years later and this is considered the first medical report on melanoma written in English. But Norris went a bit further with his studies and observations on this condition and he realized that apparently skin cancer has a familial predisposition, that is the risk of getting this disease is increased if your family members have it.
The next important step was the discovery made by Samuel Cooper in 1840 - he realized that skin cancer in advanced stages is untreatable and the future development of the disease is very much dependable on the stage in which melanoma is removed . I guess things have not changed very much since then and now we have more methods of removing the affected tissue and more medicine.