Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Richard Bright

  • The Royal Society of Medicine of London: A brief history

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, England The origins of the Royal Society of Medicine in London can be traced back to 1805. It was in that year that a breakaway group of learned physicians and surgeons formed a new medical society, the Medical and Chirurgical Society of London. They met first in Gray’s Inn, the legal area…

  • John Bostock and hay fever

    JMS Pearce Hull, England   Fig 1. Bostock’s paper to Medico-Chirurgical Transactions of London, 1819. Before the 1800s, hay fever, now estimated as affecting 5–10% of Western populations, was not widely recognized by physicians. James MacCulloch MD FRS, a doctor and geologist, in 1828 was the first to use the term hay fever, which he…

  • Johannes Jacob Wepfer (1620-1695)

    JMS Pearce Hull, England, United Kingdom   Fig 1. Johannes Jacob Wepfer. From https://www.prints-online.com/johann-jacob-wepfer-14108627.html The eminent physician Johannes Jakob Wepfer (1620-1695) was born in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, on the right bank of the Rhine. Little is written of his early years but the child Wepfer may have gazed and wondered about Schaffhausen’s countryside, its many oriel…

  • Sir John Pringle, public health and military medicine pioneer

    Sir John Pringle. Oil painting. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) At the end of the eighteenth century, Scottish doctors were more popular with patients than English ones because “their useful knowledge contrasted with the ornamental learning of English physicians who were Anglican or Oxbridge trained.”1 By 1825 almost 70% of all fellows…

  • Harry Goldblatt and the kidney

    Dr. Harry Goldblatt. 1964. Via the National Library of Medicine. In 1928 Dr. Harry Goldblatt applied silver clamps experimentally to the renal arteries of dogs and observed a significant and sustained rise in blood pressure. His main interest as a researcher was to find a cause for hypertension, a disease for which effective treatment was…

  • The Quaker and the Jew, an enduring and impactful friendship: Thomas Hodgkin and Moses Montefiore

    Marshall A. Lichtman Rochester, New York, United States   Obelisk over Hodgkin grave site in Jaffa, Israel. Moses Montefiore, on his return to England, purchased a column of Aberdeen granite nine feet tall and had it inscribed with a lengthy tribute to Hodgkin “as a mark of my respect and esteem.” It was transported to…

  • A brief history of kidney transplantation

    Laura Carreras-Planella Marcella Franquesa Ricardo Lauzurica Francesc E. Borràs Barcelona, Spain   We may think of renal transplantation as routine therapy today, but this procedure has taken centuries to develop and is marked by important events in the history of science. An ancient description of the kidneys is found in the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus, dated…

  • Pierre Rayer (1793- 1867) – first to use microscopy to study kidney disease

    Pierre Rayer occupies a special place in the history of nephrology for his attempt to classify the various diseases that Richard Bright had described in his monumental publication of 1827. With his intern Eugene Napoleon Vigla, he revolutionized the study of kidney diseases by using microscopy to analyze urinary sediments, describing crystals, cells, casts, and…

  • History of nephrology: the middle period

    George Dunea Chicago, Illinois, United States   Domenico Cotugno Coagulable urine Despite centuries of medical progress, the presence of abnormal amounts of albumin in the urine remains to this day the most sensitive and widely used indicator of renal disease. Described by Hippocrates as “bubbles on the surface of the urine” and known to medieval…

  • Richard Bright, the father of nephrology

    Two centuries will soon have passed since Richard Bright, of Guy’s Hospital, London, described the disease that came to bear his name. Within a few years of his original publication, the term Bright’s Disease became virtually synonymous with kidney disease—in England, Germany, France, and the United States. In its full-blown formulation it consisted of four…