Stanley Bradley was an American renal physiologist who was made an honorary member of the Renal Association in the 1950s. Although he did not present a paper at a Renal Association meeting, he was among many from beyond the UK who became active supporters of the Renal Association in those early days when it was the only Anglophone society in the world devoted to the study of the kidney.
The major part of Bradley’s career was spent at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City to where he transferred from Boston as a junior lecturer in 1948, remaining at Columbia until he retired.
Bradley trained under Homer Smith, arguably the leading renal physiologist in the world at that time. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Bradley published seminal papers in various aspects of renal function and the renal circulation in health as well as in acute and chronic kidney disease, including studies of uremia and renal adaptation to injury. Bradley was also associated with the Bar Harbor laboratory in Maine which Homer Smith had founded, and his studies there included evaluation of renal function in sea fauna and in seals, particularly the diving reflex which diverted blood from the kidney with complete or partial temporary anuria.
In 1960 Bradley became Chair of Medicine and Samuel Bard Professor at Columbia, a somewhat contentious appointment since he was very much a physiology investigator rather than a clinician. He was not unique among nephrophiles of his generation in espousing that “haemodialysis is a passing fad that will soon disappear”; disapproving sufficiently to ban dialysis equipment from all Columbia’s hospitals. Those requiring dialysis were sometimes discreetly transferred by junior staff to more enlightened hospitals in Manhattan where dialysis was available.
