be drawn into the lungs. Then the pressure in the
chamber is ramped up, the chest compresses,
and the air rushes out again. Simple!
The Drinker Respirator was very expensive,
however, and so US inventor John Emerson
came up with a cheaper version. Harvard
University sued him, saying he’d infringed on
Drinker’s patents. Emerson argued that life
saving devices should be freely available to all.
This didn’t seem to impress the mercenary
US legal system, but Emerson had also
demonstrated that every aspect of Drinker’s
device had been used or published earlier by
researchers and inventors going all the way back
to, as mentioned, 1670. Drinker’s iron lung was
ruled “not novel” and his patents invalidated.CHEAPER TUBES
Meanwhile in Australia, a brutal polio epidemic
in 1937 saw demand for the iron lung sky-rocket.
The Drinker lung was huge and expensive. SoSouth Australia’s Health Department asked
biomedical engineer Edward Both to come up
with something cheaper.
He invented a wooden version called a
cabinet respirator (and eventually, a Both
Respirator) that worked so well and was so cheap
to make, patients could ind themselves shoved
into one mere hours after it had been built.
By the 1950s, iron lungs were anything but
uncommon. Hospitals wards were illed with
the things. Some patients only had to spend a
few hours a day inside, others were pretty much
suck in there permanently.
Because of the way the iron lung traps the
body, and because of the cost and bulk of the
machines, and most of all because the polio
vaccine has massively reduced the number of
poliomyelitis cases each year, these devices
aren’t used much anymore.
More than all of these though, is that positive
pressure ventilation has become the go-to
solution for patients who can’t breathe for
themselves. Mouth-to-mouth, bag valve masks,
positive airway pressure ventilators, intubation
and more are now universal and effective.
The irony though? Despite its “medieval
torture device” look, negative pressure
ventilation is actually better at replicating
normal air flow through the lungs. It makes
sense: that’s how we breathe. We don’t force
air into our bodies, we let it flow in there
thanks to air pressure.
Modern ventilation reverses the process: it
forces air in, and lets it just waft out passively.
It’s not ideal, but on the plus side a hospital
can have a cabinet full of hundreds of tubes
and masks, and of course if you have to stay on
ventilation for days or weeks, you don’t need
to be sealed inside a giant metal can.
That’s probably the worst aspect of the iron
lung, this obsolete piece of medical ingenuity
that looks so awful yet saved countless
thousands of lives. It works really, really well.The Both Respirator is a proud
Aussie invention that, while still
an “iron lung” is actually made
of wood. Cheaper, and quicker to
build, it was a vital, and effective,
weapon in the fight against polio.AUSSIE RECORD HOLDER!
Because Australians are the best at everything, it should come as
no surprise that an Australian woman holds the world record for
time spent in an iron lung. June Middleton was unlucky enough to
get polio at 22. She first used an iron lung on 5th April 1949, and kept
using the device for the next 60 years, until her death at in 2009.
She lived in Fairfield Hospital in Melbourne for over 40 years,
spending 21 hours a day in the iron lung. However, she was able to
spend her final years at home, thanks to the Yooralla Ventilator
Accommodation Support Service. Guinness World Records put her
in the book in 2006. Go Aussie.POPSCI.COM.AU 79