The State - News from Jan. 9, 1987

Doctors in San Francisco used a shock wave treatment to pulverize a seven-pound penguin’s kidney stones in what was believed to be the first such use of the high-tech procedure on a fowl or animal. “It worked,” Dr. Joachim Thuroff, director of the University of California Medical Center’s urinary stone center, said after the treatment. “The stones which I could focus on broke completely, the same as a human treatment.” Half of the penguin’s eight peanut-size kidney stones were reduced to small particles by “extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy,” doctors said. They said it would be determined later when the procedure would be repeated to rid the penguin of the rest of them. The procedure uses shock waves to disintegrate the stones while the patient sits in a tub of warm water.