When I was this young assistant at the University of Groningen my responsibility was for four beds, or rather the patients in four beds. That was all I had to do. And, one of these patients was a young man, 22 years old, who slowly and miserably died from renal failure. He became blind, he vomited, and it was a miserable death. And I, as a very, very young physician, had to tell his mother, in a black dress and a little white cap like the farmers have, that her only son was going to die. I couldn’t do a damn thing about it. So, I began to think, “If I could just every day remove as much urea as this boy creates, which is about 20 grams, then the boy could live.” Well, he died, but I began to work on that.
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Willem Kolff
Physician and inventor; builder of the first practical artificial kidney
Netherlands · 1911–2009
Science and medicine
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Dutch physician who built the first practical dialysis machine in occupied Kampen during the Second World War, then moved to the United States, where he worked on the heart-lung machine and the artificial heart at the Cleveland Clinic and the University of Utah.
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