Paediatric nephrology: scientific study of kidneys and their diseases in infants and children.

The first George Frederic Still Memorial Lecture was delivered in 1943 by S. P. Bedson, Professor of Bacteriology at the London Hospital. In expressing his appreciation for being asked to inaugurate this lectureship, he described his particular satisfaction that the choice should have fallen on a laboratory worker since it carried with it the assurance that research of the kind he had been doing, despite its academic flavour, was not without appeal to those engaged in clinical medicine. It may be a measure of one of the changes that has occurred in academic medicine in the intervening 22 years that with equal fervour I must express my satisfaction that the choice for the lecture this year has fallen on a paediatrician and clinical investigator, who is reassured that research of the type he has been doing, despite its clinical flavour, is still not without appeal. My aim, in fact, in this lecture will be to attempt to demonstrate how a primary and continuing interest in paediatrics served as the stimulus for a series of investigations of developmental renal physiology and of renal disease in infants and children. First of all, however, I should like to express my own deep appreciation to the British Paediatric Association for having asked me to give the 12th George Frederic Still Memorial Lecture. In one of the series of Pediatric Profiles in the Journal of Pediatrics, Sir Wilfred Sheldon (1956) described Still's major role in the establishment of paediatrics as a separate field of inquiry and practice in this country. Perhaps some of the differences between both academic paediatrics and paediatric practice in our two countries can be explained by the fact that a comparable pioneering effort had been made some 3; years earlier in the United States by Abraham