The Artificial Kidney.

Among the milestones in medical technology in the 1910s was the first successful application of renal dialysis to living animals in 1913. Three physicians from Johns Hopkins University — John J. Abel, Leonard G. Rowntree, and B. B. Turner — devised an apparatus to pass all the blood out of the body of a living dog through a branching network of collodion tubes immersed in a bath. They "cleansed" the blood by rinsing out toxic amounts of acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) while the blood was outside the body and restored the blood to the body without danger to the animal's life. The device was so similar in its action to the function of the kidney that the three physicians referred to it as the "artificial kidney." While the doctors did not apply their dialysis method to humans, they predicted that an artificial...