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The first widely used device was the iron lung, developed by Philip Drinker and Louis Shaw in 1928. Initially used for coal gas poisoning treatment, the iron lung gained fame for treating respiratory failure caused by polio in the mid-20th century. John Haven Emerson introduced an improved and more affordable version in 1931. The Both ...
During a major U.S. outbreak of polio in the early 1950s, hundreds of children around Dallas, Texas, including Alexander, were taken to Parkland Hospital. There, children were treated in a ward of iron lungs. He almost died in the hospital before a doctor noticed he was not breathing and rushed him into an iron lung. [7]
In 2015 his iron lung he’d lived in for most of his life started to break, but spare parts for the machine - which hadn’t been widely in circulation since the 1960s - were not readily available.
Dianne Odell (February 13, 1947 [1] – May 28, 2008) was a Tennessee woman who spent most of her life in an iron lung. [2] She contracted bulbospinal polio at age 3 in 1950 and was confined to an iron lung for the rest of her life. Due to a spinal deformity caused by the polio, she was unable to change to a portable breathing device introduced ...
He was one of many children placed inside iron lungs during an outbreak of polio in the US during the 1950s. Iron lungs were also used in the UK. The last person to use an iron lung in the UK died ...
Confined to an iron lung after contracting polio as a child, Paul Alexander managed to train himself to breathe on his own for part of the day, earned a law degree, wrote a book about his life ...
A polio patient with a paralyzed diaphragm would typically spend two weeks inside an iron lung while recovering. [8] [9] This machine kept the patient breathing, with the help of underpressure and overpressure. The whole body, except the head, was placed in a pressure chamber, where it was not possible to regulate how much air the patient received.
The last man to live in an iron lung died in Dallas on Monday. Paul Alexander, 78, spent more than 70 years confined to an iron lung after contracting polio as a child in 1952.