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Abstract
Thomas Graham ( 1805-1869), who is credited with seminal work on the nature of the diffusion of gases and of osmotic forces in fluids, can properly be called the father of modern dialysis. His apparatus to study the behavior of biological fluids through a semipermeable membrane clearly presaged the artificial kidney in clinical use today. In 1913, John Abel and coworkers reported the first application of the principles of diffusion to remove substances from the blood of living animals. Unaware of Abel's work, Georg Haas (1886-1971) performed the first human dialysis in the German town of Giessen in 1924. But it was not until 1945 that Willem Johan Kolff, working under extremely difficult wartime conditions in The Netherlands, achieved the first clinically successful hemodialysis in a human patient.
Key Words
Dialysis History Artificial kidney
Thomas Graham, a Scotsman who lived from 1805 to 1869, can properly be considered the father of modern dialysis (fig.1). Although a physical chemist, he performed seminal work in several areas of great importance to modern physiology: the discovery of the laws governing the diffusion of gases which we now call Graham's law, investigations of osmotic force, and the fractionation of biologic or chemical fluids by dialysis. Educated in Scotland, Graham studied chemistry much against his father's wishes. First a young professor at Anderson University in Glasgow, he was later appointed professor at University College, London, and in 1855 was made Master of the Mint, a position he held until his death in 1869.
During the years 1846 to 1861, he published a remarkable series of papers in the Philosphical Transactions of the Royal Society. In the first two, entitled `The Motion of Gases' (fig. 2), he described the methods for separating gasses by diffusion, which were employed nearly a century later in the separation of uranium-235 from its heavier 238 isotope [1, 2].
In his 1854 Bakerian lecture entitled `On Osmotic Force' Graham said, `The expression of osmotic force has reference to the endosmose and exosmose of Dutrochet' [3]. The Frenchman, Rene Joachim Henri Dutrochet lived from 1776 to 1847. His classic work about endosmosis and exosmosis described the process by which water passes through a semipermeable membrane from one side to another. Graham, in his Bakerian...