Highlights of 60 years of renal science

John Feehally
Renal Association Archivist

Throughout 2010, to help celebrate the Renal Association’s 60th anniversary, I will be bringing you a selection of interesting and seminal abstracts presented at RA meetings since 1950.

You will see one new abstract on the RA website each month – with commentary. With only a dozen abstracts to be selected for the whole year, I have decided to select two abstracts from each decade – and I ask you all to accept in advance that my choices will be personal and therefore perhaps idiosyncratic.

I may be taking quite a risk as the year proceeds - I have little doubt that many of you will disagree with my selections from more recent decades, and will tell me so! For the earlier years things are somewhat simpler. Firstly, with a few exceptions, those who presented and heard the papers are no longer alive to challenge me. Secondly there are fewer to choose from. In the decade 1950 to 1959 only 91 papers were presented at RA meetings, but in the years 2000 to 2009 there were 3,053. So the range of choice varies somewhat!

The 1950s

The Renal Association meetings of the 1950s were utterly different from our contemporary annual conference. A small group of physicians, surgeons, and scientists interested in the kidney would gather for an afternoon in central London to listen to scientific papers.

Remember that nephrology did not exist as a speciality, indeed the term ‘nephrology’ only began to be popularised in the 1950s. Try also to picture a clinical world which has none of the following – effective diuretics, tolerable and effective antihypertensives, forms of vitamin D effective in kidney disease, immunosuppressives other than cortisone and irradiation, dialysis [except briefly in a few places for acute renal failure], kidney transplantation [except in identical twins]. And of course no molecular or cell biology.

The topics of papers in the 1950s reflect their era,: one third were on normal renal structure and function, and another quarter on tubular pathophysiology. Most were studies of whole organisms rather than using in vitro approaches.

In the 1950s our archive is not quite complete, so that for some papers we have only the title, but no abstract. This means I could not for example select two tantalising papers from 1952 for which there is only a title – ‘One hundred cases of anuria, personally treated’ & ‘The treatment of nephrotic oedema’.

So I have chosen for January 2010:

Nephrotic proteinuria: a tubular lesion
T Freeman & A M Joekes [1956]

So I have chosen for February 2010:

The excretion of indolic acids and its relation to Hartnup disease
MD Milne [1959]

Downloads

  1. Nephrotic proteinuria - a tubular lesion
    .pdf file (94.01 KB)
    T Freeman & A M Joekes [1956]
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  2. The excretion of indolic acids and its relation to Hartnup disease
    .pdf file (80.83 KB)
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