Nature Reviews Nephrology (2019) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41581-019-0119-6 Published online 21 February 2019

In the version of this article originally published online, the date when Francois Mauriceau published one of the earliest descriptions of pre-eclampsia was incorrectly stated to be 1637, which is actually his year of birth. The work was published in 1668. This error has been corrected in the PDF and HTML versions of the article.