HISTORY LESSON- Scribner Shunt

This month in CJASN, there is a 3 page tribute to the great Scrib : Belding Scribner who discovered one of the first access devices in dialysis and changed the face of Nephrology as a field.
Before his discovery, dialysis was not done for all patients and when done, was a fresh cutdown of artery and vein and that led to lot of bleeding and people ran out of sites to do it. Scribner's idea of connecting the artery to the vein by a short shunt to preserve dialysis access allowed more dialysis for patients.
On March 9, 1960: David Dillard, cardiac surgeon implanted the first shunt made at the bedside by Quinton. The first shunt used allowed that patient to live 11 years!!
History in the making!
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21051747
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16874726