Architecture of the Kidney in Chronic Bright's Disease

This book presents a summary of previously published and more recent studies of diseased human kidneys by the methods of (1) microdissection, for the examination of the structure of renal units (nephrons) and of the vascular channels, (2) sections and staining of blocks of tissue for microscopic examination of all renal elements in unaltered relationship to one another, and (3) reconstruction in plastic form of serial sections of portions of the kidney. The author has made judicious use of imagination and even of a modicum of teleologic reasoning in an attempt to interpret his objective observations and especially to correlate structural alterations of various elements of the kidney with disturbances of renal function. By the method of microdissection he has been able to establish the existence in the diseased human kidney of the aglomerular nephron and has shown that alterations of tubular structure do not depend directly on pathologic changes