Origins and early reception of clinical dialysis.

Several medical inventors in Europe and North America brought the artificial kidney (hemodialysis) to practical usefulness in the late 1940s, but there were very few early successes. It was used at first for only desperate cases of acute renal failure. Renal authorities in the 'metabolic' tradition favored newly quantified metabolic and dietetic therapies. In part, this resistance to dialysis represented reasonable skepticism about results, but also preferences concerning what constituted 'science' within medicine.