nephrology - Hektoen International

Thomas Addis and his times

April 27, 2020

Thomas Addis. Stanford Medical History Center. Flickr. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. 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 […]

Stanley Shaldon as I knew him

April 20, 2020

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

February 13, 2020

Earl Smith Chicago, Illinois, United States Dr. Irvine Page and a lab tech at Cleveland Clinic in the 1960s. 1960s. Provided by Cleveland Clinic. Accessed via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0 Irvine Page was a physician scientist who discovered angiotensin and serotonin and proposed the multifactorial etiology of hypertension. He was a prolific medical […]

Saul Bellow visits a dialysis unit

October 1, 2019

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

April 17, 2019

Mårten Segelmark Lund, Sweden Figure 1. Nils Alwall in 1965 with one of the first long-time survivors. (Picture archive of the South Swedish Society for History of Medicine) 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 […]

Scarred for life

March 27, 2019

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

November 7, 2018

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

November 2, 2018

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

October 16, 2018

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 […]

High blood pressure and the kidney: the forgotten contribution of William Senhouse Kirkes

October 12, 2018

Excerpt from: “High blood pressure and the kidney: The forgotten contribution of William Senhouse Kirkes” by J. Stewart Cameron and Jackie Hicks The realization of the key role for raised intra-arterial pressure as a pathogenetic agent in hypertension is usually credited to Ludwig Traube. But Traube in his writings gives credit for the idea to a […]