Thomas Addis (1881—1949): Mixing Patients, Rats, and Politics
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Elsevier - Publisher Connector Kidney International, Vol. 37 (1990), pp. 833—840 HISTORICAL ARCHIVE CARL W. GOi-FSCHALK, EDITOR Thomas Addis (1881—1949): Mixing patients, rats, and politics STEVEN J. PEITZMAN Department of Medicine, Division of Nephrology and Hypertension, The Medical College of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA In the early decades of the twentieth century, with the threatat the Laboratory of the Royal College of Physicians of Edin- of epidemic infectious diseases already in decline, attentionburgh, one of Great Britain's pioneering medical research shifted to the chronic maladies: hypertension, atherosclerosis,enterprises, also supported by the Carnegie Trusts. obesity, cancer, diabetes—and nephritis, or Bright's disease. Ray Lyman Wilbur (1875—1949), dean of the young Stanford New chemical methods devised by Otto Folin (1867—1934) atMedical School in 1911, "thought it would be a good thing to Harvard and Donald D. Van Slyke (1883—1971) at the Rock-bring in a young scientist from Scotland if the right one could be efeller Institute Hospital empowered the investigation of renalfound who had been trained in German as well as British and metabolic disorders. Folin's colorimetric system provideduniversities, and who was likely to develop in some promising rapid measurement of creatinine, urea, and uric acid, while Vanfield of research" [3]. So Wilbur sent a cable of invitation to Slyke's gasometric analyses allowed quantification of urea andEdinburgh, and the young Scotsman accepted the unlikely total carbon dioxide. Also in the first decades of the twentiethposition: in 1911 Stanford was still a relatively isolated and century, the reform of medical schools provided new opportu-little-known medical school in San Francisco (the school moved nities for academic medical careers.
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