History of Nephrology 4: 3rd Congress of the International Association for the History of Nephrology, Taormina, November 2001: Reports

Reconstructing the history of nephrology is not an easy task: It requires a great deal of effort and interest on the part of the researcher, who has to explore information on diseases of the kidney in various medical texts of the past, where it has sometimes been buried for centuries. This volume of ‘History of Nephrology’ thus concentrates on the history of diseases of the kidney. Physicians have toiled in diagnosing and treating ailments of the kidney for millennia, well before the emergence of the specialty of nephrology. It is also evident that many of the best minds in medicine, when faced with the complex signs and symptoms we now classify as diseases of the kidney, were initially puzzled by them and then satisfied by merely describing them. While the thriving of anatomy allowed of some of these clinical manifestations to be attributed to pathologies of the kidney observed at autopsy, it was only after the Scientific Revolution and during the era of Enlightenment that most of these descriptive entities came to be grouped under the taxonomic terms by which any medical student today can make a specific diagnosis of kidney disease. Their treatment, however, whether symptomatic or curative, had to await the post World War II period of flourishing basic research. Nephrologists as well as those interested in the history of medicine in general will find this book a veritable treasure trove of information.