Robert Graves Lecture 1976_Dr. Edmund Bourke

14/09/1976 in Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, 6, Kildare Street, Dublin 2

Edmund Bourke, Department of Clinical Medicine, Trinity College, Meath Hospital, Dublin 8.

Studies on Metabolic Aspects of Acid-Base Regulation

In the early 19th century the Irish constantly filtered through the renal physician, Robert Graves, noted the glomerulus but by a complex series of presence of ammonia in freshly voided urine from certain patients at the Month Hospital, Dublin (Graves, 1843). He concluded that it derived from the kidney–rather than as had heretofore been observed – from putrefaction. It would appear that the patients in whom Graves first observed it had metabolic acidosis. Of recent decades the observation has come to occupy a role central to our understanding of acid base homeostasis.

Irish J Med Sci December 1977, Volume 146, Issue 1, pp 119–129

This being the sixteenth Graves Lecture since its beginnings in 1961.