In Honor of Dr. Kenneth Charles Appell

My name is David Paul Appell. I'm a writer and editor for a variety of national and international media, but the thing of which I'm the most proud is that my father is Kenneth Charles Appell, the surgeon who in early 1963 revolutionized hemodialysis, improving and saving countless lives, by inventing the arteriovenous fistula while he was on staff at New York's Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital. Though it was entirely his idea and initiative, because he modestly delayed publishing his own results, two other doctors, James Cimino and secondarily Michael Brescia, went ahead and published in the New England Journal of Medicine (misspelling Dr. Appell's name in the process). As a result, the AV fistula unfairly and inaccurately became known as the Cimino shunt, Cimino-Brescia shunt, or Cimino-Brescia fistula, and over the years my father's authorship was all but shunted aside.

Now, more than 40 years later, fortunately, the record has finally, slowly, started to be set straight. Most notably, Dr. Appell was contacted by Dr. José Ramón Polo, a surgeon at the prestigious Gregorio Marañón Hospital in Madrid, Spain, who back in 1988 had heard him speak on the AV fistula at a conference in Phoenix, Arizona. Dr. Polo felt that history had done my dad a grave injustice, and thankfully had the initiative, persistence and most importantly the good heart to set about helping to correct this. Through e-mail exchanges and a personal interview during my family's visit to Madrid in November 2004, Dr. Polo wrote up a "historical vignette" article entitled "Kenneth Charles Appell, M.D.: the surgeon who performed the first radiocephalic fistulas for hemodialysis," which was published in the February 2006 issue of The American Surgeon (Vol. 72, No. 2). Then on November 14, 2007, Dr. Appell gave a very well received keynote address on the subject in New York City at the annual meeting of the Vascular Access Society of the Americas during the Veith Symposium.

Despite the above, I've realized that in all too many in-print and online sources, as well as in the minds of many patients and people in the medical field, Kenneth Appell's seminal contribution is still attributed to the onetime friends and colleagues who took credit for the AV fistula and allowed it to be misnamed for all these years. So with the help of the Internet and those people, like Dr. Polo, who have stood by him, I have created this extensively documented Web site both as a tribute to my father's distinguished medical career and to combat this misinformation, giving credit where it is so clearly due. Millions of patients around the world owe their lives and quality of life to a brilliant but very modest, self-effacing surgeon who was too much of a gentleman to fight for the honor he was due, and who has been the most wonderful father I could have ever asked for.

Going forward, I will be adding photos, video, and other documentation chronicling Dr. Appell's remarkable career. Please stay tuned.