Turkish Nephrology on the 100th Anniversary of the Republic

Abstract

Nephrology specialization, obtained by completing a three-year subspecialty training after internal medicine specialization in Turkey, focuses mainly on diagnosing and treating kidney diseases. For thousands of years before the advent of the nephrology specialty, doctors struggled to diagnose kidney disorders. Nephrology is a term of Greek origin, nephros, meaning "kidney," combined with the suffix -logy, meaning "the study of." The word "kidney" appears for the first time in Turkish in the Orkhon inscriptions as "bögür," which indicates the name of the space between the rib bone and the hip. In the historical periods of Turkish, it is in the form of words meaning "kidney, bögür, böğür, bügür, bögr, yan." Later, in the Ottoman Period, the word “böğrek” was probably used in the sense of kidney by adding the suffix "-ek" to the word “böğür.” Although the term "böğür" is still widely used among the public to associate it with where the organ is located, it is now referred to as "kidney = böbrek". In the history of nephrology, diseases were first tried to be diagnosed and treated with clinical findings and urine analysis. In the 1940s, the basic principles of fluid-electrolyte physiology, homeostasis, the physiopathology of fluid-electrolyte disorders, renal functions, and dysfunctions began to be understood.