Hermann Senator and albuminuria--forgotten pioneering work in the 19th century.

Testing urinary albumin concentration by immune detection methods has recently turned out to be a highly rewarding procedure, as low level albumin excretion has turned out to be a powerful predictor of cardiovascular and renal risk in diabetic and nondiabetic patients. In the following we discuss a text dating back to the 19th century in order to make today's nephrologists aware of the remarkable and prescient, but meanwhile completely forgotten investigations on urinary albumin excretion in individuals without primary kidney disease. The treatise of Hermann Senator convincingly disproved the then held dogma that albuminuria was always a sign of primary renal disease. These observations are all the more remarkable since he was forced to use relatively simple and not absolutely specific methods. He further provided an explanation of the renal handling of albumin which to a large extent is still valid today.