Editorial Review:

Small and bean shaped, the kidneys are sophisticated organs that filter waste from the blood. A number of diseases and disorders -- including diabetes and hypertension -- can harm the kidneys and cause them to fail.

Historian and nephrologist Steven J. Peitzman traces the medical history of kidney disease alongside the personal experience of illness. Drawing on diaries, letters, literary narratives, and scientific writings, Peitzman charts the triumphs of medical innovators like Richard Bright, Thomas Addis, and Belding Scribner as well as the stories of persons, famous and not, who have struggled with the disease.

Conditions once known as "Bright's Disease" are now recognized as complex disorders with names such as glomerulopathy and acute tubular necrosis. Treatments have evolved from abdominal tapping and dietetics to hemodialysis and transplantation. Medical advances have improved the well-being and prognosis of persons with failing kidneys. Yet such persons continue on an arduous journey of chronic illness. Peitzman travels with them, from diagnosis to treatment, and witnesses their remarkable ability to cope.

Joining the clinician's perspective with the historian's analysis, this fascinating chronicle offers insight into how diseases are defined, categorized, and understood and explains current concepts of how kidney disease behaves and how modern therapy works.

Customer Reviews:

Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0

A wonderfully interesting and informative book:

I enjoy reading books on diseases, and have read several - on such subjects as smallpox, polio, bubonic plague, and others. Well, this book is slightly different, in that instead of focusing on a specific disease, it looks at diseases of the kidneys. As a genealogist, I have often read seen family histories that mention "dropsy" and death certificates that mention "Bright's Disease." But, what does that mean for the person so diagnosed?
Well, this book does a great job of explaining what it meant to... more info

The organ that gets no respect... until it is needed:

This is the second book in the new series, Johns Hopkins Biographies of Diseases. The first, on malaria, is on my reading list. This one, Dropsy, Dialysis, Transplant: A Short History of Failing Kidneys, encourages me to read all the books in this series as they appear.
Physician Steven Peitzman takes the reader on a trip through the practical and technological stages of understanding and treating renal (kidney) disease, later to become kidney (renal) disease. From the diagnosis and treatment of... more info

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