nephron

Term: nephron

Origin: Anc Greek

νεφρός/nephros(=kidney)

νέο/neo or νάσσω/nasso(=fill, overflow)

Literally meaning : filled with(blood)

Coined/History

(?)

The ancients did not have a clear idea about the structure and function of the kidney and only Galen reffered to “a stuctureless mass of veins”. Only after Galilei’s invention of the lens was microscopical observation of the kidney possible, reveiling the renal medulla that released  a liquid like urine ( Lorenzo Bellini, “De Structura et Usu Renum”). Later Italian physician Marcello Malpighi (1628 –1694) described in De Remibus, the renal glomerule. In Malpighi's “De viscerum structura execitatio anatomica (1666) gives a detailed and fairly accurate account of the structure of the kidney showing that in kidney there are many wormlike vessels (canaliculi) next to many small glands (that;s is, Malpighian corpuscles). Malpighi used a colored liquid to prove that “the glads in kidney communicated with the arterial extremities” and he specculated that their function was to secrete the urine.    In 1842 Englist surgeon and anatomist Sir William Bowman, (1816 –1892)  he identified, using also microscope, what then became known as the Bowman’s capsule, a main portion of nephron, and he  presented his findings in his paper "On the Structure and Use of the Malpighian Bodies of the kidney”"

Definition

Nephron is the basic structural and functional unit of the kidney responsible for the actual purification and filtration of the blood by regulating the amount of water, salts, glucose, urea and other minerals in body.