Don't know if this link will work, but give it a go. I seeem to find out about the most interesting people only if they have just died and their obituary appears in the paper.
The obit was much more interesting than this dry description. It admitted that at least his first (8? or 14?) patients died despite his attempts at helping, but his designs were real ingenuity and he was constantly working on improvements. He used sausage skins for the first attempts at dialysis!
The other thing that made me smile was that his wife divorced him as they were approaching their tenth decade, because she said he spent too much time on his work. He never really retired...
So here's to someone who really did something amazing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willem_Johan_KolffNowadays, we'd get nowhere this way, because garden shed engineering is not seen as good enough, but that is pretty much how he started out.
And thanks for posting up Mary Seacole. Nightingale is often portrayed as a sort of comforting angel, but I think she was more likely not to mix too much with the patients, and stick to the cleaner jobs like inventing the pie chart...
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