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An iron lung is a type of negative pressure ventilator, a mechanical respirator which encloses most of a person's body and varies the air pressure in the enclosed space to stimulate breathing. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] It assists breathing when muscle control is lost, or the work of breathing exceeds the person's ability. [ 1 ]
Alexander self-published his memoir, Three Minutes for a Dog: My Life in an Iron Lung, in April 2020 with the assistance of friend and former nurse Norman D. Brown. [17] [18] Alexander spent more than eight years writing the book, using a plastic stick and a pen to tap out on a keyboard or by dictating the words to his friend.
The polio survivor spent more than 70 years being kept alive by the medical device.
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.
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 ...
In most NPVs (such as the iron lung in the diagram), the negative pressure is applied to the patient's torso, or entire body below the neck, to cause their chest to expand, expanding their lungs, drawing air into the patient's lungs through their airway, assisting (or forcing) inhalation. When negative pressure is released, the chest naturally ...
An Emerson iron lung. The patient lies within the chamber, which when sealed provides an oscillating atmospheric pressure. This particular machine was donated to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Museum by the family of polio patient Barton Hebert of Covington, Louisiana, who had used the device from the late 1950s until his death in 2003.
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 ...