First Use of the Iron Lung - Oct. 12, 1928

An iron lung was used for the first time on this day in 1928. There's more about iron lungs and their uses in polio cases in the January 30, 2017 episode of Stuff You Missed in History Class, "Ed Roberts and the Independent Living Movement," and the November 11, 2011 episode, "Polio: The Dread Disease."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to This Day in History Class from how Stuff
Works dot Com and from the desk of Stuff You
Missed in History Class. It's the show where we explore
the past one day at a time with a quick
look at what happened today in history. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and it's October twelve.

(00:22):
The iron lung was used for the first time on
this day in The iron lung is mostly associated with polio,
and polio is a viral disease. It primarily affects children
under the age of five, although obviously not exclusively children
under the age of five. In addition to symptoms like
fever and headache and vomiting, polio attacks the nervous system

(00:43):
and it causes paralysis because if it's typically young patients
and the way the disease progresses into paralysis, it's also
been known as infantile paralysis. Polio still exists today and
there is still no cure for it, but it is
preventible with vaccine. So while polio is rare to non
existent in some parts of the world today, it's endemic

(01:05):
in a few others and it can spread from one
part of the world to the other. Sometimes, as polio
progresses and it causes paralysis. It paralyzes muscles that are
associated with breathing. It affects a person's ability to breathe,
and before the introduction of the iron lung, this was
usually fatal often but not all the time. The paralysis
caused by polio is temporary, so people thought if there

(01:29):
was some kind of way to keep patients breathing during
this paralysis, but they might recover afterward. But they just
didn't know how to do that, how to keep people breathing,
and that brings us to the iron lung. The iron
lung is more properly called the negative pressure ventilator. It
looks like a big metal cylinder large enough for a

(01:49):
person's whole body minus their head to fit into, so
it's from the neck down. Typically, there is a bed
inside of the tube that can be slid in and
out of the cylinder, which allows the patient to removed
and returned when necessary. There are windows and portholes and
the sides of the cylinder that let caregivers touch the
person inside and adjust their betting, generally care for them

(02:11):
while they're in the respirator. The iron lung works by
alternately lowering and raising the pressure inside of this chamber,
so when the pressure is lowered, air is drawn into
the lungs to the patient's nose and mouth, and then
when the pressure is raised, the air is pushed back
out and that forces the patient to exhale. It also
allows them to speak during that exhaled breath, so for

(02:33):
a person who's using an iron lung, speech is usually
timed to the machines cycle of breathing. The iron lung
was developed by Philip Drinker, who at the time was
an assistant professor in the Department of Ventilation and Illumination
at the Harvard School of Public Health. He developed the
idea of creating some kind of a ventilator for polio
patients when he went to Children's Hospital in Boston. He

(02:55):
was trying to figure out a temperature control issue in
a room that was used to care for pre mature infants,
and while he was there he saw children with polio
who were just struggling to breathe. The device that he
developed was at first called the Drinker Respirator, and it
was used for the first time in a clinical trial
at Children's Hospital, and that trial started on October twel

(03:17):
This first iron lung was a lot boxier than the
tube like respirators that were used later, and it was
powered by two household vacuum cleaners. It completely changed the
world of polio treatment. Though. It allowed patients with temporary
paralysis to keep breathing until their bodies recovered and they
were able to breathe on their own again, and it

(03:39):
provided ongoing breathing support for people whose paralysis was permanent. Today,
iron lungs have almost completely been replaced by other respiration technologies,
but as of fourteen, there were only about ten in
use around the world. Still, mostly there were people who
had survived polio in childhood back decades ago. You can

(04:00):
learn more about the iron lung and the contexts in
which it has been used in the November twenty one
eleven episode of Stuff You Missed in History Class called
Polio the dread Disease, and in the January episode Ed
Roberts and the Independent Living Movement. Thanks to Teri Harrison
for all her audio work on this podcast, and you
can subscribe to the Stay in History Class on Apple Podcasts,

(04:21):
Google Podcasts, and We're Real to get your podcast. You
can tune in tomorrow for the return of a language,