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From the end of the 19th century to the 1950s, from mechanisms of disease and pathology to the first success of hemodialysis, the author depicts the history of acute kidney injury. These remarkable improvements of modern medicine led concurrently to the spread of hemodialysis for the replacement of end-stage renal disease., (Copyright © 2012. Published by Elsevier SAS.)

In the early 1950s, a few renal allografts were performed without immunosuppression in man. The paper describes these attempts and tries to explain the behavior of the medical doctors who undertook these human experimentations taking into account their personality, the knowledge at that time and the absence of treatment for end stage chronic renal failure.