Ippolito Albertini and Michael Albertus: disparate old and innovative theories on dropsy and edema.

The concept of edema and dropsy as a part of heart and renal failure developed in the 17th and 18th centuries with the observations of Albertini, who realized that two clinical entities were derived from the blood rather than the tissues. Albertus, who lived in the same period, was the last physician to interpret fluid accumulation according to the old, scholastic and dogmatic procedures of medicine. The fundamental concepts of Albertus held little in addition to the classification and categories of the physicians of the Middle Ages.