Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Dialysis
/daɪˈæləsɪs/noun
The removal of waste from the blood by passing it through a semipermeable membrane, in place of failing kidneys.
The Greek roots
διά
diá
through, apart
λύω
lýō
to loosen, release
Literally: “a loosening apart”
The story of the word
In Greek διάλυσις meant a breaking-up of any kind: an army dispersing, an assembly ending, a marriage dissolved. Thomas Graham took it in 1861 for his laboratory technique of separating substances through a parchment membrane, purely a chemist's word. The medical machine came later, and Willem Kolff built the first workable artificial kidney in the occupied Netherlands in 1943 out of sausage casing and a drum.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1861
Same family
analysisparalysiscatalystelectrolysis
In a sentence
He is on dialysis three mornings a week and plans his life around it.