The disease was named by a Swiss paediatrician, Guido Fanconi but it has been with us since the middle ages. It was not fully understood till the 1930’s. Literary evidence reveals that the scientists from Germany and Switzerland were the first to discover the association between salt loss and the disease. The credit goes to Dorothy Hansine Anderson as she was the first to identify and describe the disease in 1938. Soon after, in 1940, she developed a test for diagnosing the disease.