In my early years it was undoubtedly my father. My father was director of a sanatorium for pulmonary tuberculosis, and at that time there were no antibiotics, tuberculosis was a terrible disease. And, he and I would walk in the woods around that sanatorium and he would discuss his worries about his patients. And from him, I certainly inherited this extreme concern about the well-being of patients. I’ve seen him very happy when he succeeded after months and months of rest and other things to have these people go home cured. I’ve also seen him crying and desperate after trying for a long time and a patient did not get well, and went home to die.
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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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