FLETT, GEORGE WILSON

Born abt 01/12/1922, Rathven, Banffshire

Died 26/01/1943, 11:50pm, age 20, at Meanskirk Hospital, Renfrew

Buried 01/02/1943

C/JX 158466, Able Seaman, Royal Navy, HMS Osprey

Son of William Flett (b 1885, a fisherman) and Mary Janie Murray (b 1888), married 12/12/1912 in Rathven.

From their fathers’ professions on the marriage certificate, it is evident that both the Fletts and the Murrays were fishing families. Mary was a domestic servant.

1936 – widowed Mary is listed at 35 Brereton Avenue, Cleethorpes. Her husband had died at sea the previous year.

1939 – Mary is living at 234 Convamore Road, Grimsby

HMS Osprey was an anti-submarine training establishment, which was based at Dunoon in Scotland from 1941-1946. It was established within the requisitioned buildings of the West of Scotland Convalescent Homes in Dunoon, having been transferred from its original home in Portland during 1941, when the original site was considered to be too vulnerable to aerial observation and attack by the Luftwaffe.

 Address on death registration: Halstead, Anningson Lane, New Waltham

Grave Ref: Section E, grave L14

 Cause of death: Illness - sub-acute nephritis (5 months) and Uremia. Essentially his kidneys became inflamed and eventually failed, leading to waste in the blood. His mother was the informant, so was presumably there when George died.

 Sadly there were no dialysis machines around when George’s kidneys were failing, but in the same year that he died, the first dialyzer was being constructed in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands by a young Dutch physician called Dr Willem Kolff, the man considered the father of dialysis.

www.davita.com  carries the story of Kolff’s remarkable invention:

 “The road to Kolff’s creation of an artificial kidney began in the late 1930s when he was working in a small ward at the University of Groningen Hospital in the Netherlands. There, Kolff watched helplessly as a young man died slowly of kidney failure. Kolff decided to find a way to make a machine that would do the work of the kidneys. The young doctor searched the university library for information on removing toxins from blood and stumbled across an article about hemodialysis with animals published in 1913 by John Abel, a renowned pharmacologist at Johns Hopkins University. Abel’s writing inspired Kolff, and he became committed to the development of an artificial kidney.

At about the same time that Kolff began his research, World War II erupted. Once the Nazis overtook the Netherlands, Kolff was sent to work in a remote Dutch hospital.

Despite challenging conditions, the young physician pressed on. Although materials were scarce, Kolff possessed the resourceful spirit of the true inventor and improvised, using sausage skins, orange juice cans, a washing machine and other common items to make a device that could clear the blood of toxins. Amazingly, he carried on his experiment under Nazi scrutiny, risking his own life by forging documents so that he could continue his work. Kolff was able to get his wife and colleagues to help, even though it meant they too were putting themselves in danger.

In 1943, Kolff’s invention, although crude, was completed. During the course of the next two years, he treated 16 patients with acute kidney failure but had little success. All that changed in 1945, when a 67-year-old woman in uremic coma regained consciousness after 11 hours of hemodialysis with Kolff’s dialyzer. Her first words? “I’m going to divorce my husband!” Thanks to Kolff, she did in fact follow through on her plan and lived seven more years before dying of another ailment.

Kolff’s machine is considered the first modern drum dialyzer, and it remained the standard for the next decade. At the time of its creation, Kolff’s goal was to help kidneys recover. The brave doctor had no way of knowing that his invention was one of the foremost life-saving developments in the history of modern medicine.

After World War II ended, Kolff donated the five artificial kidneys he’d made to hospitals around the world, including Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York. Because of this unselfish act, doctors in many countries were able to learn about the practice of dialysis.

In the late 40s, Kolff came to the US, where he continued his research. At the time, many people in the medical field were scandalized by kidney dialysis, calling it “an abomination.” Kolff and others like him who worked with dialysis were frequently ridiculed. But Kolff didn’t give up.

At Mt. Sinai Hospital, he instructed other doctors in the use of his artificial kidney, but the hospital’s administrators were opposed to this type of therapy. Therefore, Kolff and his colleagues were forced to perform dialysis in a surgical suite after hours. Spectators crowded the gallery to watch the “rogues” in action.

The next few years saw many strides in dialysis. Kolff gave a set of blueprints for his kidney machine to George Thorn at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. This led to the manufacture of the next generation of Kolff’s dialyzer, a stainless steel Kolff-Brigham kidney, which paved the way for the first kidney transplant in 1954. During the Korean War, Kolff-Brigham dialyzers were instrumental in the treatment of injured American soldiers.”