Healers

Willem Kolff

Physician and Inventor

Citation Formats

General Reference

Medicine Atlas. "Willem Kolff." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://medicine.interactiveatlas.org/healers/willem-kolff.

APA Style

Medicine Atlas. (n.d.). Willem Kolff. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://medicine.interactiveatlas.org/healers/willem-kolff

BibTeX

@misc{medicineatlas-willem-kolff,
  author = {Medicine Atlas},
  title = {Willem Kolff},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://medicine.interactiveatlas.org/healers/willem-kolff},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Willem Kolff was a Dutch-American physician widely regarded as the father of dialysis. In 1943, in Nazi-occupied Netherlands, he built the first working dialysis machine, a rotating-drum device that filtered a patient's blood outside the body to do the work failed kidneys could not. He emigrated to the United States after the war and, at the University of Utah, led early research toward the artificial heart, work that helped earn him the description father of artificial organs. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research in 2002 for his work on the artificial kidney and dialysis.

Facts

Birth Year

1911 1

Birth Date

1911-02-14 1

Death Year

2009 1

Death Date

2009-02-11 1

Cross-Tradition Connections