Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Category: Nephrology

  • Unlikely pioneers in renal transplantation: The Little Company of Mary Sisters

    Jayant Radhakrishnan Darien, Illinois, United States   The first kidney transplant was performed by Dr. Richard Lawler, Dr. James West, and Dr. Raymond Murphy at Little Company of Mary Hospital, Evergreen Park, IL. Photo courtesy of OSF Little Company of Mary Medical center.  Dr. Joseph Murray deservedly received the Nobel Prize in 1990 for his magnificent pioneering…

  • Thomas Addis and his times

    Thomas Addis, one of the most prominent students of the kidney during the first half of the twentieth century, was born in Edinburgh in 1881.1-3 Recruited by Stanford Medical School University in 1911, he spent almost his entire academic life there. After a brief interest in hemophilia and bilirubin metabolism, he switched to the study…

  • Stanley Shaldon as I knew him

    Stanley Shaldon. Photo by the author. Stanley Shaldon belonged to that first generation of nephrologists who made dialysis available at a time when uremia was a sentence of death. He was one of the bright young registrars whom Professor Sheila Sherlock took with her from the Royal Postgraduate Medical School at Hammersmith to the Royal…

  • Irvine H. Page, M.D. (1901–1991)

    Earl SmithChicago, Illinois, United States Irvine Page was a physician scientist who discovered angiotensin and serotonin and proposed the multifactorial etiology of hypertension. He was a prolific medical writer and was instrumental in establishing what is now the National Academy of Medicine. Dr. Page initially intended to become a chemist. Following his graduation from Cornell…

  • Saul Bellow visits a dialysis unit

    The Dean’s December, published in 1982, is a highly autobiographical book written by Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow.1 It is about the experiences of a university Dean and is divided into two episodes.2 The first takes place in Bucharest, where the Dean visits his mother-in-law, once a prominent but now politically disgraced party member lying…

  • Nils Alwall—One of the founding fathers of nephrology

    Mårten SegelmarkLund, Sweden More than two million people suffering from kidney failure are currently being kept alive by dialysis. But when Nils Alwall was a young doctor eighty years ago, medicine had little to offer to the patients with kidney diseases other than bed rest and tasteless diets, measures that only added new burdens to…

  • Scarred for life

    Shanda McCutcheon Calgary, Alberta, Canada   Three Months Post Donation, Michael, his wife Rebecca and their two youngest children with Shanda (far right) Source: Personal photograph of author Most mornings I wake and it does not seem like it happened at all. Still half asleep, I step under the cascading waters of a warm shower…

  • Korotkov’s Sound

    Joseph deBettencourt Chicago, Illinois, United States     A portrait of Nikolai Sergeevich Korotkov I’m watching, knees bending, Looking meek, my heart quiet, Drifting away are the shadows Of fussy world affairs While I’m envisioning, dreaming of voices from other worlds -Aleksandr Blok, untitled poem, July 3, 1901a   Stepping off the train in northern…

  • Sir William Gull, polymath and pioneer physician

    William Gull (1816-1890) is remembered by nephrologists as one of the prominent Guy’s Hospital physicians who worked to extend the seminal observations first made by Richard Bright. These investigators worked at a time when blood measurements were not available in clinical medicine and the role of hypertension in causing disease was not appreciated. They tried…

  • History of nephrology vignettes

      Hippocrates: “Those whose urine is merely blood-stained have suffered in the veins. When urine is thick, and there are passed with it small pieces of flesh like hair, you must know that these symptoms result from the kidneys and arthritic complaints.” Bubbles appearing on the surface of the urine indicate disease of the kidneys…