In 1935, Addis attended an academic conference of the International Physiological Congress in Leningrad and he returned from his visit to the Soviet Union with glowing accounts of the socialist state’s progress in public health. He was particularly impressed that Soviet doctors had experimented with human cadaveric kidney transplants as early as 1933. Thereafter he lobbied vigorously for national health insurance, which eventually prompted the American Medical Association to expel him.
