‘The Secretion of the Urine’. How Professor Cushny’s patience was sorely tried

In a book best taken in small doses, Walter John O’Connor* described British physiologists who were active between 1885 and 1914. Amongst the seemingly endless clinicians filling in by lecturing in physiology to medical students before getting a ‘proper’ hospital job, there are the ones who were truly brilliant and not afraid to express their opinions of others working in the their field.

I came across this gem, taken from a preface to a book on the kidney entitled, The Secretion of the Urine, published in 1917:

No other organ of the body has suffered so much from poor work as the kidney, and in no other region of physiology does so much base coin pass as legal tender. It was therefore necessary to sift thoroughly this mass of printed matter of over 6,000 pages, and I have read it carefully and, as far as might be, sympathetically, though I must confess that my patience has been sorely tried by some papers in which the depth bore no proportion to the length. 

I have fellow feeling for his suffering, in my case, substituting ‘mammary gland’ for ‘kidney’. Sadly, scientific dross is an increasing problem a hundred years later.

The writer extracting the urine was Arthur Robertson Cushny FRS (1866-1926) who was described by his obituarist for the Royal Society, Sir Henry Dale as, ‘by common consent the leading Pharmacologist of this country. The course of his career, moreover, had taken him into other countries, where he was known and honoured as in his own, so that his reputation and authority in his own subject, and in a wider field of experimental medicine, were truly international'.

Arthur Robertson Cushny

The last point is driven home by the fact that having been born the son of a Scottish clergyman who graduated from the University of Aberdeen, he first went to Switzerland and then to Strasbourg. While there was was persuaded to become Professor of Pharmacology (pharmacology and physiology were then virtually the same field) at Ann Arbor in Michigan. He stayed there for 12 years before returning to Britain in 1905, first in University College London and then from 1918 to Edinburgh—a chair he had always coveted. There he lived in Peffermill House, a stone-built fortified tower built in 1636.

In his book on the kidney, Cushny emphasised the ‘modern theory’ of urine formation, i.e. a filtrate of the blood formed by the glomerulus, modified by reabsorption in the tubule downstream. However, Cushny himself got into a bit of a mess trying to sort out the opposing ideas of how the kidney worked. Seven years later, 1n 1924, definitive evidence was published which showed that the ‘modern theory’, first proposed by Carl Ludwig (1816-1895) in the mid-1800s, was correct.

Cushny's diagram from his book

*Walter John O’Connor (1911-1994) was well qualified to write on Cushny. He worked in physiology at the University of Leeds from 1950 until he retired in 1976; he was known as ‘Willy Oc’ or ‘John’ there and as ‘Jack’ to his family. South Australian by birth, O’Connor was medically qualified. He worked in Cambridge with one on my list of all-time greats, Ernest Basil Verney FRS (1894-1967), on the kidney and antidiuretic hormone; at one stage there he was Beit Memorial Research Fellow. I remember seeing O’Connor at meetings of the Physiological Society in the early 1970s.

Cushny AR. 1917. The Secretion of the Urine. London: Longmans Green.

Dale, HH (as ‘HHD’). Arthur Robertson Cushny—1866-1926. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 100 xix-xxvii.

Jamison RL. 2014. Resolving an 80-yr-old controversy: the beginning of the modern era of renal physiology. Advances in Physiology Education 38, 286-295. doi:10.1152/advan.00105.2014 

O’Connor WJ. 1991. British Physiologists 1885—1914. Manchester University Press.