In 1872, the Hungarian born dermatologist Moriz Kaposi that was practicing in Vienna first described a rare endemic disease that bears his name, among elderly persons of Central European or Mediterranean origin named "idiopathic multiple pigmented sarcoma of the skin". Ten years later the Italian dermatologist Tommaso de Amicis confirms Kaposi's findings. For more than a century the disease was known as a rare low grade malignancy till the 1980s AIDS epidemic.