Professor Eric G.L. Bywaters, Acute Kidney Injury and the "forgotten" letter.

The Bywaters seminal 1941 British Medical Journal paper on the crush syndrome was important both for its written content and for using a photomicrograph demonstrating pigmented casts in the renal tubules. He appeared to be reporting the first cases of renal failure secondary to crushing injuries. Most at this point would have been content yet Bywaters demonstrated both determination and humility by publishing a letter in the BMJ 4 months later. This letter, now almost forgotten and rarely referenced, significantly corrected his original paper. He identified that descriptions of the syndrome had been made before, not least by German pathologists in World War 1. The letter recognised various pathologists and surgeons, Colmers (1909) reporting on casualties from the Messina earthquake suffering from acute pressure necrosis and Frankenthal (1916) describing soldiers who had been buried in the trenches showing oedema, bloody urine and post mortem ischaemic muscle necrosis. Others were credited as describing similar cases in inaccessible journals or in "inaugural dissertations". Hackradt (1917) described injuries from burial with oedema of the leg and bloody urine containing albumin and casts, necropsy showed muscle necrosis and tubular degeneration in the kidneys with blood casts and Lewin (1919) described 3 similar cases. Bywaters subsequently credits Minami (1923) a Japanese dermatologist working in Germany for summarizing the literature and providing a description that tallied exactly with his own. Finally Bywaters puzzles why the standard textbooks on war surgery available in Great Britain and the U.S.A. in 1941 make no mention of this entity.