PREFACE BY ALBERT EINSTEIN. Man and His Gods

Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1953. First edition, second printing.

SIGNED COPY--A UNIQUE VIEW OF WESTERN THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY BY THE "DEAN OF RENAL PHYSIOLOGY," HOMER W. SMITH, WITH PREFACE BY ALBERT EINSTEIN.

8 1/4 inches tall hardcover, publisher's red cloth binding, author's inscription to front free endpaper, "For Elliot Levy/ With my warmet regards/ Homer W Smith/ March 24, 1955," foreword by Albert Einstein, x, 501 pp, very good, lacks dust jacket (but front and back flaps conserved and included), in custom archival mylar cover. Not only does this book begin with a preface by Albert Einstein, it ends with "The Story of This Book," a detailed autobiography of the author.

HOMER WILLIAM SMITH (1895-1962) not only became the dean of renal physiology but emerged as a truly polymathic figure whose writings and contributions encompassed evolution, philosophy, religion, and music. For him, science and philosophy were inseparable and he was preoccupied not only with the origin of life and its evolution over the millennia from the simplest to the most complex forms, but also with the meaning of life, consciousness, and man's place in the universe. Smith was raised in Cripple Creek, Colorado, and graduated from the University of Denver. After serving in the Armed Forces during WWI at the Chemical Warfare Station in Washington, he was transferred to work with Dr. E.K. Marshall at Johns Hopkins to study the biological action of gases. Smith subsequently earned his DSc in public health from Hopkins, and then completed a fellowship with W.B. Cannon at Harvard. His first academic position was to head the Department of Physiology at the University of Virginia from 1925 to 1928, when he was appointed chair of physiology at New York University College of Medicine, where he remained the rest of his life. Homer Smith's studies of the kidney began with Claude Bernard 's concept of the constaney of the "internal environment"; he approached this idea through the comparative physiology of the body fluids and of the excretory organs. The studies on the kidney took two directions. On the one hand was the development of precise methods for assessing renal performance-the reliable measurements of the filtration rate, renal blood flow, and tubular excretion and reabsorption in animals and man. On the other was a fresh appraisal of the evolution of the kidney in the light of comparative physiology and geology. In 1928, as the newly appointed Professor of Physiology at New York University College of Medicine he traveled to Africa to obtain lungfish for study during activity and during estivation. His subsequent scientific life centered around three laboratories: the physiological laboratory at the New York University medical school, the Marine Biological Laboratory at Salisbury Cove, Maine, and the clinical investigative "unit" at Bellevue Hospital. Smith's studies of the kidney culminated in 1951 in the classical monograph, "The Kidney, Structure and Function in Health and Disease"; in this scholarly volume, existing knowledge of the kidney was critically reviewed and weighed in the balance of his own experience. In 1953, the reflective essay From Fish to Philosopher described the evolutionary role of the kidney in enabling survival in water and on land and in the emergence of man as a thinking, conscious being. The theme was the belief in the orderly sequence of nature and the concept that the disciplined ways of science would ultimately disclose the plan. Instead of confining his doubts and his diseoveries to fellow scientists, Homer Smith announced them to all who would listen. In 1932, he published Kamongo, a fictional account of his search for the lungfish, in which he questioned man 's place in nature by recounting, in a masterly fashion, an imaginary debate between a young scientist and an Anglican missionary as their ship moved through the Red Sea. In 1952, he re-examined the same subject on new grounds: Man and His Gods considered man's ideas about the supernatural in the perspective of the evolution of Western theology and philosophy from the ancient Egyptians to the nineteenth century. [A.P. Fishman. Homer W. Smith (1895-1962). Circulation (1962) 26:984-985; S.E. Bradley. Homer William Smith: A personal memoir. Nephrol. Dial. Transplant (1995) 10:2360-2364; C.W. Gottschalk. Homer William Smith - A Remembrance. J.Am.Soc.Nephrol. (1995) 5:1984-1987].