When did nephrology emerge as a medical specialty
Words involving the Greek root nephros for the kidney have been used for centuries.
The word “nephrology” as a discipline for the study of the kidney in health and disease came into use in the opening decades of the 19th century but did not actually enter the parlance of medicine until the middle of the 20th century, at which time several events contributed to the emergence of nephrology as a medical specialty.
First was the continued and increasing number of published articles on kidney function that had been prompted by the World War II medical effort to study shock, climatic adaptation, renal clearance of drugs, and hemodynamics.
Second was technological advances that were of direct clinical relevance to kidney disease, specifically dialysis, kidney transplantation, and kidney biopsy.
The first physician to call himself a “nephrologist,” as one who specializes in diseases of the kidney, was Arthur Arnold Osman (1893–1972) in 1945, who went on to help found the U.K. Renal Association in 1950 and served as its first president for the next 6 years.
The Italian Società Italiana di Nefrologia was founded thereafter in 1957, and the French Société de Nephrologie in 1959. The first medical publication devoted to the discipline, Minerva Nefrologica, appeared in Italy in 1957. As the number of physiologists, pathologists, and clinicians interested in the kidney increased, the membership of these societies increased and new national organizations were established.
In 1960 the first international meeting of nephrologists was held in Evian, leading to the establishment of the International Society of Nephrology in 1961 and the launching of its first official journal, Nephron, in 1964. The American Society of Nephrology was founded in 1966, and its official journal, the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, was published in 1990.
As a result, all the “nephrophiles” of the past and the budding “nephrologists” thereafter now had a discipline to rally around.
