Michael Darmady studied acute renal failure (ARF; later known as Acute Kidney Injury, AKI) during the latter part of World War 2 (1939-45),as a medical officer and pathologist in the RAF. He was appointed as a pathologist in the hospital at RAF Wroughton (later known as the Princess Alexandra Hospital), which in 1944-45 the hospital received casualties flown back from the invasion of France. His December 1944 paper on ‘traumatic uraemia’  appparently led a doctor at the Swedish embassy draw his attention to Kolff’s work. This led to him applying for an MRC grant, with which he built and ran a dialysis machine for patients local to Salisbury. Dialysis was done at Salisbury General Infirmary and other hospitals in the region, taking his machine where it was needed. This was only the second machine to be used successfully in the UK, very soon after a trial with one of the original Kolff machines at Hammersmith Hospital. So for a short time, Salisbury was one of the only two places with dialysis machines in the UK.

The machine was constructed from aluminium, probably from aeroplane parts, by Goddards garage in Salisbury.

The video below shows Darmady explaining his machine in 1947. He treated patients into at least the following year, but seems to have abandoned the technique afterwards. His comments at meetings suggested that he found dialysis to be dauntingly demanding, and felt that conservative measures could prove adequate in most cases.  

Salisbury hospital archives are based in a wartime Nissen hut at Salisbury District Hospital, on the site of a wartime army base used by US soldiers before the invasion of Normandy. It contains a modest amount about Darmady, but this notably includes his 1947 MD thesis on acute renal failure, in which he describes ARF in multiple war casualties, and experiments in rabbits. A detailed account of the patients he treated by dialysis was never published, though he describes his experience in short items at contemporary meetings.

His interest in ARF and later work on microdissection of nephrons from diseased kidneys kept him in the renal academic community for many years, as he became increasingly diverted by managing pathological services. Among his side-lines was seeing the need for accurate weight measurement in patients with ARF and other fluid imbalances, so he approached Avery to manufacture bed-weighing machines, which can be seen in many photos of dialysis units in the 1960s (Darmady 1954)(e.g. see photos on the pages of xxx and yyy units).

Progress of patients with ARF from Darmady’s MD thesis (1947)

Further info

• ARF (AKI) in the 1940s (this site)
  
• More about Darmady and his other achievements (UKKA obituary).
• Cameron JS 2007. Nephrologist extraordinary—Michael Darmady (1906–1989) – coverage includes his later renal work which extended into the 1980s. Nephrol Dial Transplant 22 715-21 (paywall).
  

Authorship

First published April 2025

Last Updated on April 25, 2025 by neilturn