The Life & Career of Kenneth Charles Appell, M.D.: A Quick Biography

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On March 23, 1923, Kenneth Appell was born in New York City on Manhattan’s Upper East Side (East 77th Street, off York Avenue); after the death of his mother, his father moved with Ken and his sister Florence into a brick two-bedroom house in Astoria, Queens (see gallery).

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In 1940-42, he attended Manhattan College in the Bronx, New York City, but his undergrad career was interrupted in 1942-46 by service in the U.S. Navy. He trained and was stationed at J.V. Newland Field at Baylor University in Waco, Texas; Lambert Field in St. Louis, Missouri; and air bases in Jacksonville and Pensacola, Florida. He subsequently flew missions in the Pacific theater of World War II.

The war over, in 1946-47 Ken Appell completed studies and graduated (second in his class) from Manhattan College. In 1947 he continued on to Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington, DC, graduating in 1951 with that year’s Gold Medal in Pathology. During medical school, he returned to Astoria to marry fiancée Marcella Varmuza, who then moved to DC with him.

Right out of medical school, the newly minted physician did a 1951-52 rotating internship, at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York City. That was followed in 1951-56 by a general surgery residence, then a year as research associate, at Brooklyn VA Hospital in Bay Ridge.

After being certified in 1958 as a diplomate of the ABS (American Board of Surgery), the following year Dr. Appell served as surgical coordinator at Grasslands Hospital in the Westchester County (New York) town of Valhalla. A year after that, he and his wife moved to Westchester, to the city of Port Chester.

Following two years as attending surgeon at the Bronx VA Medical Center, in 1961-62, through 1965 he became general surgery section chief and research associate at this same hospital. It was here, in 1963, that Kenneth Appell made medical history with his invention of the AV fistula (aka the radiocephalic fistula). During this period he also taught as a clinical instructor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

The Sixties were a busy decade indeed for this distinguished surgeon. Overlapping with his tenure at the Bronx V.A., in 1962-69 he was also visiting surgeon at Harlem Hospital in upper Manhattan, and in 1963-69 served as Chief of Surgery at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. This non-profit insitutition affiliated with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York is the United States’ only fully accredited specialty hospital providing acute and palliative care exclusively for advanced cancer patients. On top of all the above, during his last year Dr. Appell was also president of Calvary's board of directors. It was also during this period, in 1968, that he received a Veterans’ Administration commendation for advances in the field of hemodialysis -- primarily for his creation of the AV fistula.

In 1969, Dr. Appell's life changed significantly once again. He spent part of that year as a consultant in vascular sugery at the Holy Name Hospital in Teaneck, New Jersey and consultant in surgery at St. Joseph’s Hospital in the Westchester city of Yonkers. But that same year, he moved with his family (wife Marcy, son David, daughter Ann) to the part-rural/part-suburban town of Red Hook, 100 miles north of New York City in the Hudson Valley’s Dutchess County, and started practicing medicine at Northern Dutchess Hospital in nearby Rhinebeck. His first partner in practice was Dr. Bill Jameison, followed as of 1980 by Dr. Jim Wing.

Since 1969, Kenneth Appell has been an attending surgeon at Northern Dutchess, as well as Chief of Surgery for much of that time; in 1973 also became an attending surgeon at Rhinebeck’s Ferncliff Nursing Home. He continues at both institutions to this day, even in semi-retirement.

In more recent years, Kenneth Appell's invention of the AV fistula has finally begun to be somewhat better appreciated after years of unfair attribution to colleagues in the Bronx V.A.'s nephrology unit (it has sometimes, for example, been referred to as the Brescia-Cimino shunt). Landmarks in this process included a well received paper on the subject Dr. Appell delivered in 1988 at the Symposium on Vascular Access for Hemodialysis, held in Phoenix, Arizona. The pace has picked up a bit in the past three years, most notably in 2006 when José Ramón Polo, a distinguished surgeon based at Gregorio Marañón Hospital in Madrid, Spain, published a "historical vignette" article. "Kenneth Charles Appell, M.D.: The Surgeon Who Performed the First Radiocephalic Fistulas for Hemodialysis" appeared in the February issue of The American Surgeon (Vol. 72, No. 2). In November of last year, Dr. Appell presented keynote address at the tenth annual Veith Symposium on Vascular Access in New York City, and was awarded honory membership in the Vascular Access Society of the Americas.

For additional specifics on and images of Kenneth Charles Appell's life and career, please see the accompanying photo gallery.