Gordon DW Murray

Gordon DW Murray (* 1894 ; † 1976 ) was a Canadian surgeon. He was one of the pioneers of the artificial kidney . He built the first artificial kidney in North America, successfully tested on patients.

Life

Murray studied medicine from 1914, interrupted from military service in the First World War. In 1921 he graduated from the University of Toronto and then went to London for his surgical training. He has been to various London hospitals and in 1926 became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. He then returned to North America and soon became a surgeon at Toronto General Hospital. From the 1940s he built various prototypes of artificial kidneys, the first in 1945/46, the second in 1952/53. He worked independently of Willem Kolff in the Netherlands and Nils Alwall in Sweden around the same time. The machine was successfully tested on patients in 1946, it was also recognized by the press and Murray lectured on it at a surgeon congress in Chicago in 1947 and in London in 1949. However, a lack of acceptance and support among colleagues meant that this was not followed up in Toronto. Murray saw himself primarily as a heart surgeon. When the second improved dialysis machine from 1952/53, which he had developed together with Walter Roschlau and which had been thoroughly tested on patients, a hired German assistant declared the invention to be his own on his return to Germany, Murray lost all interest and turned completely deviate from this research. Kolff's design prevailed for the artificial kidney, supported in the USA by surgeons at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital.

He also developed new methods in cardiac surgery and tested heparin in clinical use with Charles Best .

In 1964 he received the Canada Gairdner International Award .

Fonts

• Medicine in the Making, The Ryerson Press, Toronto 1960
• Quest in Medicine, The Ryerson Press, Toronto 1963
• with E. Delorme, N. Thomas: Development of an artificial kidney, Arch Surg ., Vol. 55, 1947, pp. 505-522
• with E. Delorme, N. Thomas: Artificial kidney, Journal of the American Medical Association , Volume 137, 1948, pp. 1596-1599
• with E. Delorme, H. Thomas: Artificial kidney, British Medical Journal , Volume 2, 1949, pp. 887-891

literature

• Shelley McKellar: The Career of Gordon Murray: Patterns of Change in Mid-Twentieth Century Medicine in Canada, Dissertation, University of Toronto 1999
• Shelley McKellar: Surgical limits. The life of Gordon Murray, University of Toronto Press 2003

Web links

• Shelley McKellar: Gordon Murray and the artificial kidney in Canada , in: Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation , Volume 14, 1999, 2766