The Body's Keepers: A Social History of Kidney Failure and Its Treatments

The kidney is an extraordinary organ-in many ways the regulator, the metronome, the keeper of the human body's delicate equilibrium. On a given day, minute by minute, it purifies the body of toxins it encounters from diet, climate, activity, and injury. It allows us to be and to move in the world. And yet most of us know so very little about these extraordinary vessels nestled in our bodies-and indeed millions of us only really learn about them when they stop working. Nearly a million Ameri...