A look back to the early days

At Northwest Kidney Centers, we are proud of our heritage as the first organization in the world founded with dialysis as its mission. We opened our museum in 2012 in celebration of our 50th anniversary. The museum is home to more than a dozen dialysis machines, a 22-foot timeline and a gallery of photos of people who have influenced kidney treatment.

The dialysis museum shows the growth of our organization, and the strong roots of kidney therapy in Seattle. We started in 1962 with one facility with three beds. Today, about 400,000 people are on dialysis in the United States alone.

Take a virtual tour

Join Dr. Suzanne Watnick, our chief medical officer, on a tour of the dialysis museum.

Where it all began

It was 1960 when Dr. Belding Scribner and his colleagues at University of Washington developed the Scribner shunt, a device made of Teflon that could link an artery and a vein. This relatively simple device was revolutionary— it made long-term dialysis possible for the first time. Chronic kidney failure was no longer a death sentence. Two years later, Northwest Kidney Centers was founded to bring the new treatment to patients in the community.

Read more about our storied history, or take a stroll through the dialysis museum yourself. There you’ll find many of the machines that made medical history.

Featured items

In the 1960s, dialysis meant a machine the size of a small refrigerator. In fact, Seattle’s first machines were built by a manufacturer of ice cream machines! Today, the smallest dialysis machine is about the size of a toaster oven.

More than a dozen machines are on display in the museum. The Mini Monster, for example, was created in 1964 at the University of Washington for the world’s first home dialysis patient. It became the prototype for nearly all single-patient hemodialysis machines in use today.

A 22-foot timeline details milestones in Northwest Kidney Centers’ history, and includes artifacts like the brass nameplate from the earliest building and an original Scribner shunt.

Machines, photos and patient stories help tell the history of life-sustaining treatments in dialysis centers as well as home dialysis, a therapy that often leads to better outcomes for people with kidney failure.

An oral history of Northwest Kidney Centers

Northwest Kidney Centers simply wouldn’t be where it is today without the incredible community of dedicated staff, volunteers, medical professionals and financial supporters who have worked hard to carry out its mission. In 2017, our 55th anniversary year, we began gathering oral histories from people who worked for and with Northwest Kidney Centers over the years. Watch our oral history video series to hear from Jo Ann Albers, our first dialysis nurse, dialysis pioneer Dr. Bob Hegstrom, and Jack Cole, who worked with Belding Scribner to perfect the Scribner shunt. The videos are also shown in our dialysis museum.