What is an Iron Lung?
No device is more associated with polio than the tank respirator, better known as the iron lung. Physicians who treated people in the acute, early stage of polio saw that many patients were unable to breathe when the virus’s action paralyzed muscle groups in the chest. Death was frequent at this stage, but those who survived usually recovered much or almost all of their former strength. Nothing worked well in keeping people breathing until 1927, when Philip Drinker and Louis Agassiz Shaw at Harvard University devised a version of a tank respirator that could maintain respiration artificially until a person could breathe independently, usually after one or two weeks. The machine was powered by an electric motor with two vacuum cleaners. The pump changed the pressure inside a rectangular, airtight metal box, pulling air in and out of the lungs. Inventor John Emerson had refined Drinker’s device and cut the cost nearly in half. Inside the tank respirator, the patient lay on a bed (sometim
An iron lung, more properly known as a negative pressure ventilator, is a medical device which is designed to help patients breathe when they have difficulty doing so on their own. The iron lung has been largely replaced with positive pressure ventilators, due to the fact that the iron lung is extremely unwieldy and difficult to use, although a handful of individuals continue to use iron lungs, and they are employed in some forms of non-invasive therapy to treat people with paralysis and breathing conditions. The iron lung is probably most closely associated in the mind of the public with poliomyelitis, also known simply as polio, a debilitating disease which causes paralysis in some patients. At one time, polio was a scourge throughout much of the world, until vaccines were developed in the 1950s, and the iron lung was a crucial treatment tool for people paralyzed by polio. For patients with temporary paralysis, the negative pressure ventilator would help them breathe while they recov
