Mary Sherman was an American orthopedic surgeon who in 1952 published one of the earliest descriptions of psoriatic arthritis in the English literature. In a time when the general consensus by American rheumatologists was that there was no sufficient evidence to consider psoriatic arthritis as a distinct entity, Mary Sherman argued otherwise. Her work provided clinical, pathological, and therapeutic evidence in support of its distinctiveness as a unique disorder separate from rheumatoid arthritis.