Hospitals have always amazed me. I was in hospital as an 8 year-old and we usually went at least once a year as a family because one of us would get strep throat (sending the rest of us into the cycle). Hospitals to me were a place of amazement as well as worry and wonder. I react quite strongly to smell and that is the worst part of hospitals as far as I am concerned, but one I have been able to overcome.
Amazing things can happen in a hospital. These days it is normal to see all sorts of machines - not only in the patient room where various fluids are administered intravenously, but also simply being driven around the hospital from the one room or area to the next. Operations can be done today that people could only have dreamed about even in my younger days.
Back during WWII young Dutch doctor Willem Johan Kolff in Groningen was frustrated that his 22 year-old patient was dying of renal failure. This caused him to look into possible solutions. By 1943, in the middle of the war and his activities working with the resistance, he developed a dialysis machine built from orange juice cans, used auto parts, and sausage casings. His 16th patient, a 67 year-old woman, was successfully treated in 1945.
Kolff moved to the US in 1950 and became a US citizen, so you might know his developments in hemodialysis as coming from an American. Hs is known as the father of artificial organs, working on artificial hearts and kidneys especially. Today people in hospitals around the world are saved because of this Dutchman’s ingenuity and desire to help people who are sick. That is what still amazes me when I walk around hospitals today and see in how many ways we are able to help people.
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