Bright was not a theorist, was devoid of special doctrines and “views,” but as Dr. Wilks[1] well puts it, “he could see, and we are struck with astonishment at his powers of observation, as he photographed pictures of disease for the study of posterity.” From this Dr. Wilks infers that he did not thoroughly perceive the value of his own work, and that he attached no more importance to diseases of the kidney than to those of the liver and brain, which he also described. Dr. Wilks even regards many observations of Bright as more novel and original when they were published than those relating to the kidney, but the latter were of more value, and their greater significance was at once recognised. It should be distinctly understood that Bright was not simply a specialist in kidney disease, but a clinical physician of rare excellence, who followed his cases into the _post mortem_ room, and carefully observed not only the changes which had taken place in the organ whose disease had caused death, but also the state of all the other organs of the body. He was one of the first, if not the first, to describe acute yellow atrophy of the liver, pigmentation of the brain in melanæmia (or pigmented blood) due to miasma, condensation of the lung in whooping-cough, unilateral convulsion without loss of consciousness in local brain diseases, the bruit of the heart in chorea, the small echinococci on the interior of hydatid cysts, &c. It is strange indeed that dropsy should have existed so long and its cause have been undiscovered; and that renal disease, as we now understand it, should have been almost unknown. For more than a century before Bright’s work was published the occurrence of albumen in the urine of dropsical persons had been known; and cases had been noted where convulsions and blood-poisoning had occurred when the kidneys had been found small and granular after death. Dr. Blackhall had written a treatise on dropsy in 1813; but though he found the urine albuminous, he rarely went to the _post mortem_ room and examined the kidneys, which indeed might often at that time remain untouched. But until Bright’s first quarto volume of “Reports of Medical Cases,” 1827, appeared, renal disease had not been recognised as an important malady; he was at once hailed as a discoverer, and the malady called after his name. He first showed how to recognise a common form of disease, and systematised what was known about it, and he further demonstrated that there were three or four varieties of it, a view which subsequent investigation has most fully confirmed and developed in most important directions. He proved that not only was there a continual withdrawal from the blood of most important albuminous constituents, but that this was frequently attended with a failure to remove by the kidneys that natural product of waste, namely urea, which remaining in the blood in excess became poisonous, and often produced convulsions and inflammations at a distance