For Looking at Kidneys

Preoccupied with research and dreading lay notice, young Dr. Moses Swick last week hid in the laboratory recesses of Manhattan's Mount Sinai Hospital. He had developed a method of making the kidneys visible to x-ray photography. The method is so original, reliable and useful that urologists dignify it with the name Swick Method. The shadow material is called lopax in the U. S., Uroselectan in Germany. Its development was the result of chance, curiosity and an inference.

Dr. Swick, 27, finished his interneship at Mount Sinai three years ago. He is a tall, muscular young man, with a ruddy complexion, bushy reddish brown hair, blue-grey eyes. He was studious, willing to work nights on an Arbeit (research problem). Dr. Emanuel Libman, always eager to help talent, gave young Dr. Swick funds to study urology in Germany.

First he worked under Professor Leopold Lichtwitz in the State Hospital at Altona, later under Professor Alexander von Lichtenberg at St. Hedwig Hospital, Berlin. To Altona, Professor Arthur H. Binz, organic chemist, sent an iodine compound which he wanted Professor Lichtwitz to use on cows infected with streptococci. The compound was N-methyl-5-iodo-z-pyridon. Dr. Swick, inquisitive, knew about all the scientific work going on at Altona. With a retentive memory, he knew that Dr. Leonard George Rowntree of the Mayo Clinic in 1923 had illuminated the kidneys & ureters faintly with sodium iodide. The iodine created the opacity. Dr. Swick asked permission to try the Binz preparation on rabbits, secured the first sharp roentgenograms of kidneys.

Germans, like Austrians, are less squeamish than Americans in trying new processes on human beings. Promptly Dr. Swick got some human urological cases, injected the drug in their veins, got excellent pictures of their urinary systems. But the patients almost went blind.

Whenever vision is suddenly affected by a drug there probably is a methyl radical (CH3) involved. Professor Binz's compound had such a methyl radical. Not worried, he offered to synthesize a more tolerable iodine preparation, soon furnished 5-iodo-2-pyridon-N-acetate of sodium, which he calls Uroselectan and U. S. urologists lopax. Injected in the veins it rapidly collects in the kidneys and shows by means of x-rays the shape of those organs and any stones or malformations there or in the ureters (leading from the kidneys to the bladder).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.