The treatment of chronic forms of nephritis by an operative procedure of splitting the capsule of the kidney was first proposed by Edebohls and advocated by him as a mode of curing ultimately the disease of these organs and restoring them to normal condition, that is, of curing the nephritis. In his list of seventy or more cases of nephritis he reports seventeen patients as permanently cured; that is, casts and albumin had disappeared from the urine, and the patients were fully restored.1 However this may be, I have not undertaken the treatment of the cases which form the basis of this paper with any such purpose in view. It can scarcely be conceived that an organ so irreparably damaged as those of any of my patients could be restored to its original integrity. The object for which I submitted the patients referred to in this paper to operation