Nephrology's history is alive and well and helps predict the future

ABSTRACT

If there can be "love in the time of cholera", then there can be history of kidney medicine in the time of COVID-19. In our article, we celebrate the history of nephrology, which unites curious young minds with the legacy built by senior figures of the discipline. Notably, technological advances such as the Internet have made nephrology history more accessible to a wide range of audiences, including young students and physicians in training. The interest that continues to prevail for the field ensures that the future of kidney medicine is bright and bound to expand in new directions. We can treat the past and the future with equal precision and rigor under the umbrella of history. One can describe a symmetrical timeline with 193 years back to Richard Bright's book in 1827, and 193 years forward to 2213 the point when some expect that human consciousness will be routinely uploaded to inorganic substrates. But for now, we shall seek to excavate the past to have a better idea of where we're going and how to achieve desired outcomes, which is especially important in a time of global health emergency, where we are all fighting a single enemy, COVID-19.